Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) claimed during a Senate hearing with tech companies on Wednesday that “anti-conservative bias is not a problem” and that the issue is not that there is too much censorship going on, but that there is not enough.
“The big tech business model, which profits ahead of people, is a real problem,” Markey claimed. “Anti-conservative bias is not a problem. The issue is not that the companies before us today are taking too many posts down, the issue is that they’re leaving too many dangerous posts up.”
“In fact, they’re amplifying harmful content so that it spreads like wildfire and torches our democracy,” Markey claimed without evidence. “Mr. Zuckerberg, when President Trump posted on Facebook that when the looting starts the shooting starts, you failed to take down that post. Within a day, the post had hundreds of thousands of shares and likes on Facebook. Since then the president has gone on national television and told a hate group to stand by and he has repeatedly refused to commit that he will accept the election results.”
“Mr. Zuckerberg, can you commit that if the president goes on Facebook and encourages violence after election results are announced that you will make sure your companies algorithms don’t spread that content and you will immediately remove those messages?” Markey asked.
WATCH:
Democrat Sen. Ed Markey flipped the script at the tech hearing saying: "The issue is not that the companies before us today is that they're taking too many posts down. The issue is that they're leaving too many dangerous posts up."
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) October 28, 2020
Republican Senators focused on sinking their teeth into Twitter CEO and left-wing activist Jack Dorsey.
“As you know, I have long been concerned about Twitter’s pattern of censoring and silencing individual Americans with whom Twitter disagrees,” Cruz said. “But two weeks ago, Twitter … crossed a threshold that is fundamental in our country. Two weeks Twitter made the unilateral decision to censor the New York Post in a series of two blockbuster articles, both alleging evidence of corruption against Joe Biden, the first concerning Ukraine, the second concerning communist China.”
“And Twitter made the decision number one to prevent users, any user, from sharing those stories, and number two you went even further and blocked the New York Post from sharing on Twitter its own reporting,” Cruz continued. “Why did Twitter make the decision to censor the New York Post?”
Dorsey responded by claiming that the platform decided to enforce its “hacked materials” policy and the goal of it was to limit the spread of materials that are hacked, and he did not want Twitter to be a distributor for hacked materials.
Cruz responded by highlighting how Twitter allowed, and even promoted, reports from The New York Times about President Donald Trump’s tax returns—which Cruz noted that it was “a crime, a federal felony, to distribute someone’s tax returns against their knowledge.”
Cruz later blasted Dorsey, asking, “Mr. Dorsey, who the hell elected you and put you in charge of what the media are allowed to report and what the American people are allowed to hear and why do you persist in behaving in a Democratic Super PAC silencing views to the contrary of your political beliefs?”
Dorsey claimed that was not happening.
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