St. Louis Reporter

Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri says proposed legislation would protect conservative speech online, but analysis by Ashley Baker of the Committee for Justice shows that Big Tech wouldn't "be required to do anything different."

“If this bill (S. 2992) were law, not a single company would be required to do anything different to conservative speech on their platform,” Ashley Baker, director of public policy for the Committee for Justice, told St. Louis Reporter. “Furthermore, the behavior that the bill seeks to regulate is not anti-competitive. Companies that are not covered under the bill promote their own products and services, both in stores and online, every day. If it is the behavior that is the problem, then the bill wouldn’t apply to just a handful of companies."

Hawley is one of the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee who co-sponsored S.2992, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, and sent it to the Senate floor for debate. The bill passed committee March 2 by a 16-6 vote, with Hawley and four Republicans voting in favor of it, according to a report by CNBC. Hawley claims that big tech companies are targeting conservative speech and are helping Democrats gain total control of the government.

Ashley Baker | Provided

“The tech titans have already booted dozens of conservatives off social media, and if they have their way, half the House Republican conference will be expelled from Congress,” Hawley wrote in an opinion piece for the New York Post. “The corporate titans seem to believe that the only way to get a democracy to their liking is to eliminate all threats to the Democratic Party’s unified control of government."

Hawley claims to be targeting “cancel culture,” which he said the tech giants support to keep conservative views at bay. However, critics claim the bill says nothing about censorship and could, in fact, make it worse. Instead, the bill would prohibit tech companies such as Google, Amazon and Apple from discriminating against smaller businesses that rely on their services, or “self-preferencing,” according to the CNBC article. For example, the measure would prevent companies like Amazon, Google and Apple from deliberately listing their own products above those of competitors on their search pages.

“It is disconcerting to see some Republican senators who are angry at Big Tech for unrelated reasons supporting this bill, when they know it will empower and embolden progressives at the Federal Trade Commission and in the Biden Justice Department bent on targeting all sectors of the economy," Baker said. "The bill would give left-leaning bureaucrats unprecedented power to manipulate the free market and the design of consumer products and services. At worst, that power will be used to advance political and social agendas that have nothing to do with promoting competition or advancing consumer welfare.”

Richard Hanania, president of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology and research fellow at Defense Priorities, claimed in a Feb. 23 Newsweek article that while Republicans may support such antitrust legislation, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act would do nothing to end deplatforming based on political views, and would be ineffective as a way to “do something” about censorship.

Hanania argues that Democrats who support bill S.2992, such as Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), one of the bill’s primary sponsors, has backed digital censorship in the past. Hanania claims that if the bill were to become law, it would be “wielded by left-wing bureaucrats and trial lawyers in the service of silencing conservative voices.”