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Every Republican Lawmaker Must Condemn Big Tech’s Election Interference

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The actions of Facebook and Twitter today represent nothing less than a brazen attempt by corrupt Big Tech partisans who intend to steal the election from the American people.

On Wednesday morning, the New York Post published a blockbuster story — complete with e-mails, documents, and photographs — detailing the efforts of Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son Hunter to sell his father’s influence to foreign oligarchs with an interest in swaying American foreign policy to support their own business efforts. And by Wednesday afternoon, monopolistic social media giants Facebook and Twitter moved to throttle and even outright ban circulation of the New York Post story.

There’s no need to speculate on why they did this. There is no justification for safety or the public interest. No one’s life was put at risk by this information. They took these actions for blatantly partisan reasons: They want Joe Biden to win.

The announcements themselves came from partisans who traded their political access for careers in Silicon Valley. When Twitter earlier this year banned the President of the United States — the leader of the free world — from tweeting a video to an interview he did on the largest cable news network in the country, it announced that action via Nick Pacilio, a former communications staffer for Democratic vice presidential Kamala Harris.

Facebook’s announcement that it would throttle access to the New York Post’s investigative reporting came via Andy Stone, a former Democratic congressional and campaign staffer who worked for Barbara Boxer and John Kerry.

As of this moment, every American voter is currently banned from linking to news reported by one of the largest papers in one of the largest states in the country. Even The New York Post’s primary Twitter account has been locked — they claim the Hunter Biden stories violate their rules against the “distribution of hacked material” — something that apparently didn’t matter regarding President Trump’s illegally obtained tax returns. Twitter users can’t even direct message the story. That’s how much CEO Jack Dorsey doesn’t want you to know what’s in it.

This represents far more than a one-off incident of an algorithm mistakenly censoring an article or user post. Instead, it is a coordinated declaration of partisan war on America’s electoral process by the unelected tech oligarch class against the American people, making use of the monopoly power and federal legal immunity afforded to these globalist overlords by the U.S. Congress and federal anti-trust authorities.

The latest effort to ban Americans from reading news about candidates for federal office represents an intentional and very public information coup. It’s long past time that the lawmakers who represent the country stand up and say enough is enough: They will no longer be able to muzzle the American public or its First Amendment free press under color of license via section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

That particular section of federal law immunizes digital platforms from certain speech published by its users or other third-parties. And even though the law gives them no protection for statements or actions they take as publishers, many courts (and most D.C.-based tech policy non-profits) have been either conned or purchased into believing that Facebook, Twitter, and Google are similarly exempt from any liability for what those institutions themselves publish of their own volition.

Thus, a law drafted to protect companies from civil liability for removing third-party-posted illegal content like child pornography is now being used as a shield against all liability, and a sword against any individual or institution who posts something that conflicts with the left-wing views of the Silicon Valley technorati.

This week, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas indicated this is an issue the Court is ready to consider if a Congress heavily influenced by Big Tech money will not. “When Congress enacted the statute, most of today’s major Internet platforms did not exist,” he wrote, “And in the 24 years since, we have never interpreted this provision. But many courts have construed the law broadly to confer sweeping immunity on some of the largest companies in the world.”

“Extending §230 immunity beyond the natural reading of the text can have serious consequences” he added, noting that while the issue is not before the Court yet, “in an appropriate case, it behooves us to do so.”

America’s elected Republicans should not wait for the Court. If Silicon Valley insists, in the vein of George Orwell’s unfortunately prophetic INGSOC, on enforcing Newspeak guidelines regardless of their relation to reality, thereby declaring openly partisan war against American news consumers, then the elected representatives of the only major political party left in America that still believes in and defends the First Amendment needs to declare war right back.

For years, Big Tech did nothing to stop the vicious and false Russian collusion hoax, which was perpetrated on the American people by Russian agent Christopher Steele and suspected Russian spy Igor Danchenko. For years, Big Tech had no problem with foreign election meddlers using its platforms to cripple the American presidency. Big Tech was fine with corrupt Ukrainian oligarchs using illegal leaks and fake news to attempt the literal overthrow and ouster of the U.S. president. Instead, they expressed their deep concern about the influence of laughable memes of Jesus endorsing Donald Trump.

Big Tech’s quislings will claim that they treat all information the same, that they would never put their dirty thumbs on the scale in favor of one party or ideological movement over the other, and that even if they did, there are reasons why this or that is a special case. But everyone with eyes to see knows the truth by now: that’s nonsense.

Enough is enough. Lawmakers can stand by and watch Big Tech steamroll information in an un-American attempt to manipulate our elections while muzzling hundreds of millions of Americans, or they can stand up and drive a spoke in the wheel.