(FreedomBeacon.com)- Yet another Congressional Democrat is trying to put pressure on social media platforms to amp up their censorship of content Democrats don’t like.
Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chair Gary Peters (D-MI) Monday sent letters to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube demanding that they provide his committee with details about their policies to mitigate “extremist” content on their platforms.
Citing the 3-hour melee at the Capitol as the pretense, Peters said he contacted each company’s CEO as part of an effort to combat “domestic terrorism” and investigate January 6. Because apparently January 6 hasn’t been investigated enough.
Peters claimed in his letters that online platforms are still being used to “fundraise, recruit, organize, train and plan for acts of terrorism.” As an example of this, Peters cited the fact that people on Twitter are still questioning the results of the 2020 election. How that has anything to do with acts of terrorism is anybody’s guess.
For four years people with #Resistance hashtags in their Twitter bios questioned the results of the 2016 election. Funny how Gary Peters didn’t see that as “domestic terrorism.”
Peters also cited the FBI-originated “Kidnap Plot” against Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer during which Peters claims the FBI-prompted “plotters” used Facebook “to communicate and share footage of paramilitary exercises” as part of this FBI-fomented “plot.”
So Peters wants these CEOs to tell him how they plan to address “the spread of violent extremist content.” He also wants to know how the platforms’ own tools to “encourage user engagement, target ads and generate revenue” may have contributed to the “amplification of dangerous and radicalizing content.”
While Peters does acknowledge that social media platforms are already taking steps to censor the people Peters disagrees with (AKA “domestic terrorists”), he questions whether or not these steps are effective enough.
This is government censorship by proxy.
The Senate cannot violate the First Amendment rights of citizens, so Gary Peters is outsourcing it to social media companies – demanding that they step in and do what he, as a US Senator, cannot.
Once social media companies do the bidding of lawmakers, they are no longer “private companies” who can “do what they want.” Instead, they become agents of the government.
