Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley warned Thursday that big tech is “acting like arms of the government” after the White House admitted that it is asking Facebook to comply with censoring anyone who posts content it deems to be “misinformation”.
Here’s the backstory:
Appearing on Fox News, Hawley warned “I think it’s really scary to have the federal government of the United States, the White House compiling lists of people, organizations, whatever and going to a private company that by the way is a monopoly – Facebook – and saying you need to censor.”
“I just think that this kind of coordination between big government and the big monopoly corporation, boy that is scary stuff,” Hawley said, adding “It really is censorship.”
Hawley continued, “at this point, you really have to wonder how private of companies they are.”
“I mean, if you are taking direction from the federal government, openly coordinating with the federal government, you have got the government saying we think this speech ought to be censored and Big Tech if they carry out those instructions, I mean, that looks like they are starting to operate as a public utility and there are many people out there who say we ought to just treat them as public utilities,” the Senator urged.
Watch:
The latest development with Facebook comes on the heels of reports that the White House is trying the same thing with Twitter, and planning on working directly with cellphone network providers to ‘fact check’ private SMS messages if they contain “misinformation about vaccines.”
