Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee on both sides of the aisle followed up on a post-election hearing last week with additional pressure for Facebook and Twitter as the two online publishers engage in a growing campaign of anti-conservative censorship.
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., pressed for more transparency over recently introduced functions and policies that the platforms were using to suppress information that ran counter to leftist dogma and talking points.
10 more questions for the record for Mark Zuckerberg and @jack following their testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee. The public deserves details on @Facebook’s “Centra” tracking platform. And on Big Tech coordinated censorship pic.twitter.com/5ZL17lpmxu
— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) November 24, 2020
Hawley homed in on tools such as Facebook’s Task tool, through which it appeared to be cross-referencing other biased platforms and organizations, using the other sites’ so-called fact-checking to reinforce their own censorship justifications.
In addition to Google and Twitter, Hawley asked about whether Facebook was relying on information from the controversial Southern Poverty Law Center, the once vaunted civil-rights advocacy group that has turned into a political arm of the Left.
The group, believed to be led at the moment by Michelle Obama’s former chief of staff, has projected its irrational and extremist positions into the discourse by classifying countless mainstream conservative organizations as “hate groups” and encouraging leftist news outfits to do likewise.
Hawley also followed up on Facebook’s covert surveillance program Centra, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg had suspiciously pleaded ignorance of during last week’s hearing.
And he asked about a Financial Times article in which Facebook acknowledged its intent to woo Democrat nominee Joe Biden should he become president—in stark contrast to the oft-contentious rapport with Republican President Donald Trump.
The company planned to carry water for Biden by encouraging its users to embrace the Paris Climate agreement, a deal brokered by the Obama administration that Trump withdrew from due to its lopsided demands on the US and other developed, Western countries, while giving serial polluters like China and India a free pass.
The plan has been criticized as a globalist wealth-redistribution scheme because the penalties to wealthy nations that failed to meet its impossible standards would be redirected to more developing nations.
Although Facebook and Twitter needed little prodding to go all in on a leftist agenda, though, that did not stop five radical Democrat senators from attempting to work the refs in a letter to the CEOs on Tuesday.
Sens. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, Gary Peters of Michigan and Bernie Sanders of Vermont demanded that the companies not relent on the partisan electioneering efforts just because the votes had been cast in the presidential race.
With the majority control of the Senate resting on Democrats’ ability to unseat two incumbent Georgia Republicans in January run-off elections, the senators said social-media publishers “must build on the playbook used in the Presidential election: fact-checks, labels, restrictions on algorithmic amplification for misinformation, additional context on trending topics, and limits on the sharing of content that violates civic integrity policies.”
Democrats have repurposed those concepts in Orwellian fashion to mean the promotion of censorship, leftist propaganda and vote fraud, respectively.
