Thread by @ggreenwald

For the third time in six months, Congress is summoning tech CEOs to testify in order to badger and coerce them to censor the internet more. Google's Pichai, Facebook's Zuckerberg & Twitter's Dorsey will all testify. I wrote about it here last month:

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

Congress has a legitimate role to play in overseeing tech giants, especially given its (valid) assessment that they wield classic monopoly power.

But they're not doing anything about that: they're instead trying to co-opt that power to censor the internet for their own interests

It's extra creepy somehow watching members of Congress sitting in their homes as they warn tech CEOs that they need to stop censoring the internet more or else they will enact laws to regulate and force them to do it:

It's kind of amazing watching this tech CEO hearing: it goes from one Democrat to one Republican & back.

Every Republican complains about excessive censorship online (against conservatives).

Every Democrat complains they're allowing too much free discourse, not censoring enough

LOL. The one thing uniting everyone is utter contempt for Mark Zuckerberg & his inability to speak like a human being and answer a single question. Sometimes it's unfair - they demand yes/no answers for very complex questions - but he can only robotically speechify, not converse.

"I don't think we should be the abriters of truth and I don't think the government should be either" --

Twitter CEO @Jack Dorsey, by the far best of the 3 tech CEOs testifying (the other two are Facebok's Zuckerberg & Google's Pichai).

All day these members of Congress have blamed every conceivable social pathology on social media companies: increased polarization, anger, depression, suicide, extremism, etc.

Maybe they should spend some time considering if their policies contribute to any of those trends?

"95% of the content we take down for hate speech is done by AI, not by humans." --

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, just now, testifying to Congress.

This hearing gets more and more authoritarian.

@RepFletcher (D-TX) just suggested the government should compile official lists of "domestic terror groups" and then social media companies would be *required* to ban any content related to it.

As the day goes on, it gets worse.

Five hours so far of listening to members of Congress demand FB, Google and Twitter censor the internet more and more. It's chilling.

(But the worst part may be that The Zuck Bot can't utter a sentence without first saying "Congressman,...." or "Congresswoman,..." - EVERY TIME).

Five hours and counting of hearing this bizarrely non-human bot robotically spout from a script. It's really funny: in all my years of watching Congressional hearings, I've never seen anything unite all members as much as visceral contempt for Mark Zuckerberg. Not even close.

A key point from @DanCrenshawTX in this hearing: Congress sees this vast power Big Tech now wields over political discourse.

Instead of stopping it, they want to seize that power for themselves by commandeering the censorship power. Exactly. More here:

graymirror.substack.com/p/big-tech-has…

This whole hearing is nothing more than an attempt by members of Congress to badger, threaten and coerce FB, Twitter and Google to use their power to censor political speech, by banning the ideas and people Congressmembers regard as adversarial. Nothing more to it than that.

When Congress or other state agencies use their power to threaten or coerce private actors to censor in accordance with their political will, the Supreme Court has ruled repeatedly that this violates the First Amendment. It is effective state censorship:

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