AZ Senate Candidate Blake Masters On Big Tech: No ‘Platform Immunity’ If You’re ‘Censoring Content And Acting Like A Publisher’

In July, 35-year-old Blake Masters, who is Chief Operating Officer of Thiel Capital and president of The Thiel Foundation, announced his candidacy for Senate in Arizona.

Should Masters win the Republican primary next August, he will face off against Democratic Senator Mark Kelley in November 2022. According to a third-quarter Federal Elections Commission (FEC) filing, Masters has raised more than $1.1 million.

On Monday, I had the opportunity to speak with Masters about a variety of topics, including big tech censorship. I also spoke with Masters about the border, which you can check out here (and the full Blake Masters interview will be released on Sunday).

With some politicians wanting to eliminate Section 230, others wanting to refine it, and still others who believe that anti-trust is the answer to big tech regulation, I asked Masters what he believes should be done about the issue.

He replied, stating that a radical reformation of Section 230, or stripping “the protection from liability from these companies,” is not off the table.

“If they want to act like publishers, we’ll treat them like publishers,” Masters said. “You don’t get platform immunity if you’re actually putting your thumb on the scale and censoring content and acting like a publisher.”

The Senate candidate then spoke about anti-trust:

Facebook is going to be this giant multinational corporation; if they’re going to actively intervene in elections, either because their founder is spending $400 million, you know, to distribute to various nonprofits in obvious partisan fashion — and then Facebook itself is censoring information about Joe Biden, about Hunter Biden in the weeks before the election. Unclear that any company should be able to have that much power. I don’t think you get to swing elections because you’re a giant multinational corporation. And so it’s unclear to me that Facebook should be allowed to have Facebook classic and Instagram and WhatsApp — and own these discrete businesses that each efficiently mine all this data about people to roll it up into one central location just so it can turn around and use that data against people to serve them targeted advertising.

Adding that “corporate concentration of power can violate people’s liberties just as much as government can,” Masters stated that he would like “more visibility” into “the algorithms” that companies like Google use.

“We know what Facebook did in the 2020 election, and that’s bad enough. But we know because their censorship was transparent. I really worry

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