Senate Democrats have created a secret plan supposedly to save us all from "Russian bots"
Taking their cue from Mussolini and Stalin, the Democrat Party has drawn up a new plan for a full government take over of the Internet in order to ban all conservative speech.
The Senate Democrats have created this secret plan supposedly to save us all from “Russian bots,” but the real purpose is to ban all speech they disagree with and so that they can control every word you see, every song you hear, and every video you watch on the Internet.
According to Reason.com:
A leaked memo circulating among Senate Democrats contains a host of bonkers authoritarian proposals for regulating digital platforms, purportedly as a way to get tough on Russian bots and fake news. To save American trust in “our institutions, democracy, free press, and markets,” it suggests, we need unprecedented and undemocratic government intervention into online press and markets, including “comprehensive (GDPR-like) data protection legislation” of the sort enacted in the E.U.
Titled “Potential Policy Proposals for Regulation of Social Media and Technology Firms,” the draft policy paper—penned by Sen. Mark Warner and leaked by an unknown source to Axios—the paper starts out by noting that Russians have long spread disinformation, including when “the Soviets tried to spread ‘fake news’ denigrating Martin Luther King” (here he fails to mention that the Americans in charge at the time did the same). But NOW IT’S DIFFERENT, because technology.
“Today’s tools seem almost built for Russian disinformation techniques,” Warner opines. And the ones to come, he assures us, will be even worse.
Remember how Russian murderer Joseph Stalin slowly erased from the Soviet history books all of the people who helped him create the Soviet Republic? Eventually, Stalin became the only “hero” left in the USSR’s “history” books. He did this to eliminate all trace of the others who were part of Soviet history so that he could control every aspect of life of the Russian people.
This is what Sen. Warner aspires to do.
Reason continues:
Other proposals include more disclosure requirements for online political speech, more spending to counter supposed cybersecurity threats, more funding for the Federal Trade Commission, a requirement that companies’ algorithms can be audited by the feds (and this data shared with universities and others), and a requirement of “interoperability between dominant platforms.”
The paper also suggests making it a rule that tech platforms above a certain size must turn over internal data and processes to “independent public interest researchers” so they can identify potential “public health/addiction effects, anticompetitive behavior, radicalization,” scams, “user propagated misinformation,” and harassment—data that could be used to “inform actions by regulators or Congress.”
And—of course— these include further revisions to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, recently amended by Congress to exclude protections for prostitution-related content. A revision to Section 230 could provide the ability for users to demand takedowns of certain sorts of content and hold platforms liable if they don’t abide, it says, while admitting that “attempting to distinguish between true disinformation and legitimate satire could prove difficult.”
This is completely anti-American. Warner wants nothing less than 100% control of what you are allowed to put on the Internet.
But this is what Democrats want. They are pining for the days when they fully controlled all media like they did in the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s. And they will do nothing less than gut the First Amendment to get that power back.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston.
