House GOP Leader Vows Aggressive Probe Into FederalBig Tech Collusion To Censor Americans
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, a fierce critic of growing American censorship and cultural cancellation, has vowed to vigorously investigate a federal agency's collusion with private entities to silence America's views on big tech platforms if Republicans take control of Congress.
McCarthy's comments on Wednesday came after Just The News reported that the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security had essentially handed over oversight to a private consortium that met federal officials' requests to censor content on social media platforms during the 2020 election.
The massive effort spanned more than 4,800 online titles, 20 media outlets, 20 conservative influencers, including Sean Hannity, Charlie Kirk and Mark Levin, and nearly 22 million social media posts, according to the consortium's internal reports.
McCarthy said the deal, which preceded the disbanded Disinformation Council, was troubling and violated the Constitution.
"I've always been a critic of Big Tech's attempts to censor the vote that the federal government gives them," the California Republican told Just the News. “Whether directly through the proposed so-called disinformation commission or indirectly through the use of private groups to carry out government orders, these are fundamental violations of the First Amendment, the foundation of our free society.
Welcoming big tech companies and the government agencies they work with will be a top priority for the Republican majority.
Many members of the Republican convention who support McCarthy are taking steps to prepare for such an investigation.
Rep. James Comer (R-Ky), the presumptive chairman of the House Oversight Committee, is preparing briefs for the parties to preserve evidence. Representative Andrew Clyde (R-Ge), a key member of the House Homeland Security Committee, has written legislation that would expressly prohibit the federal government from censoring big technology.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Ge), a conservative up for parole in 2020, is consulting with an attorney about a potential lawsuit against federal and private officials involved in the case.
McCarthy was one of the first members of Congress to warn that a new generation of liberals was trying to mount an unprecedented campaign of censorship through government and big tech allies, using the term "disinformation" to silence opponents and critics.
His warnings, which often appear in social media posts with the hashtag #StoptheBias, date back to 2018, before an avalanche of alarmist voices poured into Washington.
In a 2018 tweet, he asked then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to "explain to Congress what's going on": "Another day, another example of conservative social media censorship."
For some time, some of the more conservative members of his congress have been wary of McCarthy on the issue, based on comments the Republican leader secretly recorded. But McCarthy has since rallied House Republicans around a common anti-censorship platform, starting with a 2021 legislative framework that included oversight, accountability and antitrust measures.
"I have more faith in elected state leaders than in an unelected federal bureaucracy that is as ideologically monolithic as big tech," McCarthy said last year.
That framework is expanded on in "Engaging America," a detailed policy agenda released by McCarthy and other Republicans last month.
Mike Benz, founder of the nonprofit Internet Freedom Foundation and a former State Department censorship official in the Trump administration, said the federal agencies involved in Oversight Project 2020 have developed a model for censoring ordinary Americans. government narratives or actions.
"When you undermine them on social media by making your allegations, you're essentially launching a cyberattack on critical infrastructure," Benz said Wednesday on the John Solomon Reports podcast. "Now the trick, fueled by this tape, is that no American can now express their displeasure without apologizing for DHS surveillance."
Benz argued that the complex apparatus created by liberals in the federal bureaucracy, the media, big tech and nonprofits contains many of the same traps that Communist China used to control the free speech of its population.
"They mostly talked about their envy of the Chinese model, and that when China has populist movements and opposition groups, China has the advantage of being able to use and use its own AI," he said.
"Right now, I would say it's basically a bad version of the Chinese model," he said of the American prototype created by the Department of Homeland Security, the state and its private partners.
