Blake Masters on how to combat Big Tech
The Arizona Senate candidate spoke with Fox News Digital at the National Conservatism conference in Florida
AVENTURA, FLA. - U.S. Senate GOP candidate Blake Masters has bold ambitions on how he intends to combat Big Tech but acknowledged his pessimism that anything can be done under President Biden.
Masters, who is aiming to unseat Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly in Arizona, called for "eliminating or heavily reforming" Section 230, which gives tech companies legal protection from contest shared on their platforms from third parties.
"These companies should not get immunity from lawsuits—they're not neutral platforms, of course. They're publishers because they're editorializing, they're censoring content, they're putting their thumb on the scale. But I think we have to go so much further," Blake told Fox News Digital in an interview. "We should treat them like common carriers, right? Regulate Facebook and Twitter the same way you regulate the phone company, you just banned political discrimination. And then if they don't behave after that, maybe you use antitrust to break some of them up."
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Arizona U.S. Senate candidate Blake Masters spoke with Fox News Digital at the National Conservatism conference in Aventura, Florida, on September 11, 2022. (Joseph A. Wulfsohn/Fox News Digital)
Masters then highlighted Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's recent comments to Joe Rogan about how the FBI approached Facebook to warn them about "Russian disinformation" in the 2020 presidential election ahead of the bombshell New York Post report about Hunter Biden's laptop, which was suppressed by the platform.
"You can't have Big Tech and Big Government working together to change the outcome of an election," Masters said.
The U.S. Senate is up for grabs ahead of the November midterms with the current 50-50 split. Even if Republicans flip Congress, the likelihood that they reach the 60-vote threshold in the Senate to pass legislation is slim let alone passing any bill combating Big Tech that Biden would sign.
Arizona U.S. Senate candidate Blake Masters spoke with Fox News Digital at the National Conservatism conference in Aventura, Florida, on September 11, 2022. (Joseph A. Wulfsohn/Fox News Digital)
When pressed what sort of legislation can not only can get Democrat support but also the president's signature, Masters looked to 2024 as the solution.
"You can tell I'm very pessimistic that Biden would sign any good bill that we put in front of him, but we will try. We'll try hard," Masters told Fox News Digital. "And it'll be frustrating in 2023 and 2024, because we could probably get a lot of good legislation passed out of the Congress, put it on Biden's desk, he's not going to sign it right ?"
He continued, "We do the best we can, we go in- we block his agenda, and we use those two years to play offense because Republicans are going to take back the White House in 2024."
Arizona U.S. Senate candidate Blake Masters spoke with Fox News Digital at the National Conservatism conference in Aventura, Florida, on September 11, 2022. (Joseph A. Wulfsohn/Fox News Digital)
The Arizona Senate race has been tightening up in recent weeks with Masters currently four points behind of Kelly according to the RealClearPolitics average of polls. Republicans are hoping to flip the Senate seat red and retake the majority.
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Masters received a big boost with the endorsement of former President Trump in a crowded GOP primary, earning over 40% of the vote.
Fox News' Andrew Kugle and Haris Alic contributed to this report.