Lawmaker Aims to Force Social Media Platforms to Censor or Ban People Over Health Concerns
Showing contempt for the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, a Minnesota lawmaker aims to silence those expressing concern about coronavirus vaccines by forcing social media platforms to censor or ban them.
On July 22nd, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D, Minn.) introduced a bill that would strip social media platforms of liability protections provided under Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act when users on their platforms spread what government labels “misinformation” on issues deemed public-health emergencies. The bill was introduced following a Center for Countering Digital Hate report that blames 12 individuals for the bulk of COVID-19 vaccine “misinformation” spread through social media.
If enacted, it would give the US Health and Human Services secretary, working with federal agencies and outside experts, unprecedented power to flag First Amendment-protected opinions as “health misinformation,” and to tell private companies to remove them.
The bill not only treats the First Amendment as some quaint relic of a bygone era, it also promotes an anti-scientific approach to online content.
The late Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Charles Krauthammer said, “There is nothing more anti-scientific than the very idea that science is settled, static, impervious to challenge.”
Parler CEO George Farmer, in a Fox News op-ed, expands on Krauthammer’s statement. “That anti-scientific approach has been on full display this year, with elected officials and government bureaucrats preferring COVID dogma to the scientific process that invites debate and re-evaluation,” Farmer says. “Last year, the settled science said that children should not be in schools. In 2021, that misguided ‘settled science’ has been replaced with better science. Now we have numerous studies documenting the huge learning loss, especially for younger children, from having spent a year in virtual classes.”
Klobuchar’s bill would silence debate, stigmatize those who dare to question or criticize the government’s judgments or policies and punish companies providing platforms on which people may voice their concerns.
The bill targets engagement-enhancing algorithms, which, according to the text of the bill, “have contributed to the spread of misinformation and disinformation, with social media platforms incentivizing individuals to share content to get likes, comments, and other positive signals of engagement, which rewards engagement rather than accuracy.”
“Engagement-enhancing algorithms are indeed problematic,” says Parler Chief Policy Officer Amy Peikoff. “But this is an issue that should be left to a free market to decide. In the case of actual rights violations and damages due to algorithms, the proper means of redress is litigation brought by private individuals. Government officials telling private companies how they must treat legal speech is the stuff of totalitarian regimes, not the United States of America. Our founding fathers would be spinning in their graves. Except they’re too stunned at the audacity of Senator Klobuchar.”
Each day it becomes clearer that the future of speech in our country, particularly online speech, is not a partisan issue.
If passed, Klobuchar’s bill would enforce the same type of control over speech for which our leaders routinely shame governments of other countries. That hypocrisy alone should be a wake-up call.
