States proposing regulation to push back against big tech speech police

 Power Line:

America’s major tech companies have chosen sides. Thus the news that big tech employees contributed more to Joe Biden’s campaign than any other sector of the economy:

Employees at Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Alphabet, Google’s parent company, donated at least $15.1 million to President Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, according to Open Secrets.

The donations eclipsed the amount given from employees in the banking and legal sectors, according to The Wall Street Journal. The five companies were also the largest fundraising sources for Biden’s campaign.

Far more important than political contributions are the efforts by the social media platforms and other tech giants to suppress conservative speech. These seemingly-coordinated efforts represent by far the biggest threat to free speech in America today.

It seems clear that the most effective avenue to stop this suppression of conservative speech (or, really, any speech that doesn’t fit the narrative of the moment) is through action at the state level. Legislation intended to protect speech on social media platforms, and on the internet generally, has been introduced in at least 15 or 20 states. Here in Minnesota, I participated in drafting a bill that takes an anti-discrimination approach. It bars discrimination against users or user content on the basis of race, sex, religion or political orientation and provides minimum statutory damages of $50,000, along with attorneys’ fees.

That bill has now been introduced in the Minnesota Senate with multiple sponsors, including the Senate Majority Leader. It soon will be introduced in the House. The bill, S.F. 1253, is recorded here and is embedded below.

...

I support this legislation and hope similar laws are passed in Texas.  What they did in 2020 is reprehensible.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t
Read more