Congressional Democrats are determined to control political discourse in the United States, and to have the “tech giants"—particularly Facebook and Twitter—do the dirty work for them, in order to avoid allegations of “censorship,” thus maintaining the appearance of objectivity and political neutrality. Just as determined to expose this—even more so than the Republicans—is Glenn Greenwald, who has been on a one-man crusade, especially since he was the victim of such repression in October 2020, when an article he wrote exposing Hunter Biden’s dirty dealings was blocked by his employers in the publication he founded The Intercept.
On Thursday, March 25, the CEOs of Facebook, Twitter and Alphabet/Google were again in front of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, as Democrats—having now extended to them liability for their repressive actions under “Section 230” of the Communications Decency Act—were anxious that these Silicon Valley oligarchs have not jumped at the chance to act as despots and stamp out any remnant of Trump-ism left alive since Jan. 6, 2021. For an excruciating five hours (and for the third time since the November presidential election), social media platform hosts had to walk the tightrope, repeatedly blaming their “algorithms” for failure to meet the demands to “protect democracy.”
“Words cannot convey how chilling and authoritarian this all is,” Greenwald writes, “watching government officials, hour after hour, demand censorship of political speech and threaten punishment for failures to obey.” As Greenwald had detailed in a February article, the U.S. Supreme Court, “has repeatedly ruled that the state violates the First Amendment’s free speech guarantee when they coerce private actors to censor for them,” exactly the tyrannical goal to which these hearings were singularly devoted. Democrats “want the worst of all worlds,” he says: “To maintain Silicon Valley monopoly power but transfer the immense, menacing power to police our discourse from those companies into the hands of the Democratic-controlled Congress and Executive Branch.”
