Big Tech companies ‘change the rules on the fly’: Vivek Ramaswamy
Roivant Sciences CEO Vivek Ramaswamy argues Big Tech companies should be treated as ‘state actors’ in court.
Last month, Chinese leader Xi Jinping reportedly made China’s wealthiest man Jack Ma disappear. Here at home, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey made the president of the United States disappear. Both of these moves were shows of strength. And the parallels between them should shake every American to their core.
Silicon Valley tech giants like Twitter and Facebook are now, undisputedly, the most powerful companies in the history of the world. The Dutch East India Company wielded a private militia, but it still couldn’t control what people said and read.
As of today, President Trump will have access to neither the nuclear codes nor a Twitter account. But our new class of unelected corporate monarchs now controls whether and how Americans can hear any democratically elected president in the future.
JUDGE ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO: FREE SPEECH, THE FIRST AMENDMENT AND OUR MODERN TECH-FILLED WORLD
This is the power of the 21st-century Leviathan, far more insidious than anything Thomas Hobbes imagined. It’s the unholy marriage between big government and big business, through which corporations operate as the extended tentacles of the state.
It’s the birth of "woke capitalism" – a toxic new brew of profit-seeking and "wokeism." It's a cultural revolution perpetuated not just by politicians, but by the leaders of big corporations – especially in Silicon Valley.
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Don’t private companies get to decide who uses their platforms? Yes – if they're actually behaving as private companies. But in reality, today's corporate behemoths in Silicon Valley are effectively doing the work of big government under the cloak of private enterprise to evade constitutional constraints. Here's how the game works.
First, Congress endowed big tech with the special corporate privilege of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act that immunizes technology companies from any liability in state court for censoring or otherwise regulating user content.
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Second, liberal congressmen threatened those same companies at hearings for the last year saying that if they fail to remove "hate speech" from White nationalists, they would be punished.
Third, liberal lawmakers congratulated social media companies after they go on to censor content that Democrats don’t like.
Fourth, tech titans took their most aggressive actions of all just as Democrats are poised to have control of the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives for the first time in over a decade.
And fifth – of course – Silicon Valley billionaires made staggeringly one-sided campaign contributions to those same Democratic candidates as a show of good faith, and to remind them where their bread is buttered.
In 2020, "keeping money out of politics" ceased to be a liberal mantra. Instead, blending profits with politics became the new progressive way. Consequently, we have devolved from a three-branch federal government to one with a headquarters in Silicon Valley and a branch office in Washington D.C., and with no pesky constitutional term limits for Jack Dorsey and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Hopefully, victories in court against today’s new class of state-like actors will spawn a cultural revival that steadily restores the voice of every American.
The great challenge for today’s conservative movement isn’t to simply dismantle big government. It’s to dismantle the powerful henchmen of big government in the private sector. They can fire you, tarnish your reputation, excise you from the Internet and cancel your identity. You can either speak your mind freely or enjoy the comforts of modern life. But you can no longer safely do both.
Conservative solutions must be prudent, not merely reactionary. Enacting regulations out of spite will only favor big business leaders who deftly capture the regulatory process. Likewise, repealing Section 230 would be a boon to big tech in the long run. The statute was a bad mistake but repealing it now would simply empower Silicon Valley’s titans against smaller startups since larger companies can better withstand legal liability.
Instead, the right first step is to work through the last institutional bastion that we can trust – our court system – to recognize that state action dressed up as private business is still state action. The First Amendment applies to big tech censorship, a view supported by certain Supreme Court precedents.
Hopefully, victories in court against today’s new class of state-like actors will spawn a cultural revival that steadily restores the voice of every American – in their places of work and their sites of worship, at the dinner table and on the Internet.
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No doubt this will be difficult for both populist conservatives and classical free-market conservatives to swallow. But to borrow from Dorothy in "The Wizard of Oz," we’re not in 1980 anymore. The problem isn’t just big government; it’s the woke-industrial complex. Defeating that monster should be the defining challenge of the new conservative movement.
If we succeed, the prize is worth winning: a revival of true democracy and true capitalism in America. To save both, we need to disentangle each from the other. The leaders who help the Republican Party understand this new reality will hold the keys to the GOP’s future – and more importantly, our country's future as well.