Debating the stance of Trump, DeSantis, and other Republicans on Big Tech in 2024.
The First Republican Presidential Debate: Examining Big Tech
The first Republican presidential debate is fast approaching on Aug. 23, where candidates hope to close the gap on former President Donald Trump and separate from the rest of the pack. In this series, Up For Debate, the Washington Examiner will look at a key issue or policy every day up until debate day and where key candidates stand. Today’s story will examine Big Tech.
Large technology companies like Google, Amazon, X, formerly known as Twitter, and Meta maintain tight control of the digital marketplace, allowing them to control both what is said and whose viewpoints are the most prominent. While the platforms claim that they are fair and will host a variety of views, the prominence of these companies in the digital marketplace remains.
Some Republicans have alleged that these companies have discriminated against conservatives and that Congress needs to remove Section 230, a crucial part of communications law that protects websites from being held accountable for what users post to them. This became a larger rallying cry in 2021 after former President Donald Trump was barred from Twitter, a move that drew criticism from pro-Trump Republicans.
Up For Debate: Where Trump, DeSantis, and Rest of Republican 2024 Field Stand on Key Issues
The candidates appear in agreement about the outsize role Big Tech plays in everyday life, as well as the fear of conservative censorship. Some are more vocal about acting on the fear, such as Trump and his previous pushes to force legal reform around online speech. Others have taken legislative action, striving to limit the Big Tech platform’s influence as a whole.
Here’s where the leading presidential candidates stand concerning Big Tech and conservative censorship:
Donald Trump
Trump has been a critic of Section 230 for several years, claiming that it protected Big Tech unnecessarily. He called for the law to be repealed and signed an executive order during his first term in May 2020 to revoke some of the protections from the law, only for the law to be challenged in court. He vetoed the National Defense Authorization Act in 2020 because it did not revoke Section 230.
“Your failure to terminate the very dangerous national security risk of Section 230 will make our intelligence virtually impossible to conduct without everyone knowing what we are doing at every step,” Trump said in a statement following the veto.
Trump has also advocated for the United States to hold Big Tech companies responsible for their conduct rather than Europe, which maintains a far stricter set of user data and privacy laws. These laws are often used to fine Big Tech companies hundreds of millions of dollars.
Trump issued an executive order in May 2020 that threatened penalties against social media companies if they were found banning or limiting speech based on political views. The former president also said in July 2020 that he would “bring fairness” to Big Tech through an executive order if Congress did not take action to deal with social media censorship and Section 230. Neither Trump nor his team followed up on the orders during his term.
Ron DeSantis
DeSantis’s career has been marked by a push for culture war conflicts. One of his most notable decisions was the passage of S.B. 7072. This bill would allow Florida residents to sue a tech company for up to $250,000 a day for removing a statewide political candidate from its platform for more than two weeks, or notably less for county or local positions. The law passed in the state House and Senate and was signed into law on May 24, 2021. DeSantis presented it as a challenge to Big Tech companies like Facebook and Twitter. The law was quickly challenged in court over allegations of it breaching a user’s right to free speech and is still in court as of this week.
DeSantis also pushed a fairly wide-ranging tech agenda for his state in March when he signed into law a “Digital Bill of Rights.” The bill adds biometric and geolocation data to the state’s definition of personal data, and it requires Google and other search engines to disclose if search results are prioritized based on political or monetary incentives. The Digital Bill of Rights also barred government employees from coordinating with Big Tech companies on regulating speech.
Tim Scott
Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) has denounced Big Tech censorship like many of his Republicans.
“Big Tech needs to be reined in,” Scott posted on Jan. 1, 2021, “and I will vote with the President when Section 230 reform is on the Senate floor.”
Scott was a co-sponsor of the Political BIAS Emails Act, legislation that would hold Big Tech sites accountable when they allegedly use algorithms to hide political emails. The bill arose in response to allegations that Gmail placed Republican fundraising emails into spam folders more than Democrats. Google had initially implemented a program to limit the placement of political emails into spam folders but discontinued it in January after the Federal Election Commission dismissed Republican claims of bias.
Nikki Haley
Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley spoke out in June 2020 about the censorship of conservatives on Big Tech, claiming that it “violates the spirit of the law & the 1st Amendment.” She also argued that “more regulation would go too far in the other direction, putting bureaucrats & lawyers in control of what gets said online. Either way, free speech loses.”
Haley also opposed the censoring of Trump after Twitter removed him from the platform after the Jan. 6 riots. “Silencing people, not to mention the President of the U.S., is what happens in China, not our country,” she posted on Jan. 8.
Vivek Ramaswamy
The technology CEO has regularly slammed Big Tech companies, claiming that they’re woke and a threat to the United States. He argued that it was “time to amend Section 230” and that Big Tech companies could either “operate like a normal company without the federal blanket of immunity,” or they could “agree to abide by the First Amendment in return for that immunity.”
Ramaswamy spoke out in 2021 after Twitter removed Trump from its platform and Apple and Google removed the conservative social network Parler from the app stores over allegations that they hosted Jan. 6 organizers. He argued in an opinion piece co-authored with constitutional scholar Jed Rubenfeld that people should sue Big Tech companies for violating their First Amendment rights.
Ramaswamy was also vocally critical of how antitrust law works today. He has requested that lawmakers take action against Big Tech but claims “standard antitrust laws won’t stop Big Tech’s monopoly on ideas.”
The tech entrepreneur argues that Facebook and Google should be treated as “state actors” due to their acting in the interests of the federal government.
Others
Former Vice President Mike Pence previously slammed the censorship of conservatives on social media. He also supported previously proposed plans from former Attorney General Bill Barr to reform Section 230.
Conservative commentator Larry Elder slammed Meta and Twitter in a January 2022 opinion piece, calling former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg “thugs” for censoring Republicans.
Former Texas Rep. Will Hurd seemed skeptical of conservative claims of censorship on social media. “I think the data, when you look at some of the conservative outlets on Facebook at least, they have way more following than a lot of the mainstream media, even when you combine them … I don’t think the facts … play out that way,” Hurd told the Washington Post.
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