“Hey tech companies, can you censor that app or these views? We’re soon going to be discussing anti-trust, taxation, privacy, right to repair, gig economy, and other topics in this session of Congress but first let’s discuss what you’re doing about our political adversaries on your platforms.”
More on this topic: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/how-silicon-valley-in-a-sho... https://greenwald.substack.com/p/congress-in-a-five-hour-hea...
Frankly, you’d have a much better case if you pointed at politicians with much more power abusing their position (eg Trump or Biden), at least they have real influence on the DOD and DOJ. But even here, (recent) history has shown that this influence has very hard limits. Like Trump trying to punish Amazon by getting a cloud computing contract awarded to Microsoft, which was unwound this week due to undue influence playing a factor.
Strongly disagree. This is how China does it: they won’t tell companies what exactly to censor, but the companies will be punished if they don’t censor what the government wants to be censored in retrospect. It is much worse than governments forcing censorship explicitly, because otherwise companies are led to guess at government intentions and will be very conservative in what speech they allow.