Letter by Balbir Grewal of Phoenix
The first hearing of the Jan. 6 Select Committee should be a clarion call for collective action to combat harmful speech and misinformation across online platforms.
Congress is currently looking at several bills designed to regulate Big Tech and surly encouraging enhanced content moderation on those platforms should be a priority.
However, two bills backed sponsored by progressive Democrats will make content moderation more difficult.
The American Innovation and Choice Online Act (HR 3816) and the Ending Platform Monopolies Act (HR 3825) require that major platforms not discriminate among “similarly situated business users.”
This would prevent Facebook or YouTube from removing or downranking hate speech, conspiracy theorists or insurrectionist speech (such as Alex Jones’ Infowars or Parler) because doing so would “discriminate” against their apps.
Apple would be required to carry Parler, Gab and 4Chan in the App Store because such policies would “discriminate among similarly situated business users.”
Should this bill pass, more Americans would be exposed to free for all applications where misinformation thrives and the hands of platforms like Facebook would be forced to sit back and watch as their applications begin to resemble 4Chan. These bills would also limit technology platforms’ ability to elevate important information for public benefit.
Google and Facebook periodically promote their own tools to help distribute public health and vaccine information, help consumers find and patronize minority-owned and local businesses, and to share polling place information, and amber and crisis alerts. That could be impossible under should these bills pass.
Now, at this fragile time in our Democracy, is absolutely the wrong time to pass bills that would hamper efforts to push back against problematic information being circulate online.
Rather, Congress should work to ensure that the type of online activity that fueled Jan. 6 is not allowed to propagate again.
