Thread by @ggreenwald

Congress Escalates Pressure on Tech Giants to Censor More, Threatening the First Amendment

greenwald.substack.com/p/congress-esc…

For the third time in less than five months, Congress has summoned tech CEOs, with the explicit intent to coerce them to censor more content.

In their zeal to control online speech, House Dems are getting closer to the constitutional line, if they have not already crossed it.

In 2018, the ACLU defended the NRA when it sued Cuomo and NY State for something similar: implicitly threatening businesses with punishment if they kept doing business with the group.

This is what ACLU's @benwizner told me about these latest efforts with Dems & Silicon Valley:

Increasingly, Dems and their corporate media allies are realizing they can seize power over social media platforms.

The First Amendment is implicated by these coercive actions as much as if Congress enacted laws explicitly mandating censorship of their political opponents.

The power to control the flow of information and the boundaries of permissible speech is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime. It is a power as intoxicating as it is menacing.

greenwald.substack.com/p/congress-esc…

Remember: the last time Congress summed social media CEOs to be interrogated, Sen. @EdMarkey left no doubt about what the demand of Democrats is when doing this: we want you to censor more (and obviously, the content they want censored is from their political adversaries):

I wrote over the weekend about how Congress has summoned social media CEOs for the third time in 5 months, with the stated goal to pressure them to censor more.

Now House Dems are doing the same thing to cable execs. They want their critics silenced:

nytimes.com/2021/02/22/bus…