Thursday morning, October 1, the Senate Commerce committee voted unanimously to issue subpoenas to the CEOs of Facebook, Google, and Twitter; showing a significant escalation in Congress’s ongoing efforts to reexamine the liability protections of Section 230. The three CEOs will now be ordered to appear before the committee at a date still to be scheduled.
The hearing comes as the committee considers a new bill from Sen. Lindsay Graham, intended to limit the scope of “Good Samaritan” moderation that receives legal protections under Section 230. But the senators’ concerns reached far beyond 230, with different members also raising questions about privacy protections and broader antitrust issues.
“Big Tech, I believe, poses the single greatest threat to free speech in our day, and the single greatest threat to democracy in our day,” Sen. Ted Cruz (Republican – Texas) told the committee. “It should speak volumes that every member of our committee just voted to issue these subpoenas.”
A number of tech regulations have stalled out during this congressional session, ranging from privacy measures like the Browser Act to more recent bills to add an ambiguous “good faith” requirement to Section 230. Most recently, lawmakers attempted a bipartisan compromise in the PACT Act, which aims to address concerns of market power and ideological moderation bias in a single measure. But with only weeks to go before the national election, none of the bills are likely to proceed in this Congress.
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