Sen. Mike Lee renews vow to focus on tech giants he says are biased towards concervatives.
Vows to target companies are, in his opinion, biased against conservatives.
(Photo by Jacquelyn Martin | AP File) Then-Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights Senator Mike Lee, R-Utah, speaks during a hearing on whether Google has affected competition in online advertising on September 15, 2020 .
Utah Senator Mike Lee promised Tuesday to continue fighting tech and social media giants who he believes are unjustly directed against conservatives – after Twitter recently banned former President Donald Trump for good.
“We are now seeing a world before our eyes where the massive tech companies that make so much of our daily lives possible are no longer just content to benefit from us,” he said. “They also want to control what information we are allowed to access.”
This was part of a statement he made Tuesday when he became the senior Republican on the Senate Judicial Cartel Committee, a resignation from his previous role as chairman when Republicans controlled the Senate. His party lost control after the last election.
However, Lee said that with a current 50:50 split in the Senate – with Vice President Kamala Harris breaking all votes – “any effort to reform or update our antitrust laws must be a bipartisan effort with buy-in from both sides. ”
He said he still sees himself as a “leader” as “antitrust law and policy continue to make headlines” and “there seems to be a broad consensus that the status quo is not working”.
And with that power he will continue to target great technology.
He claimed that “Big Tech’s actions continue to divide the nation, undermine fundamental freedoms and distort the market. The Silicon Valley fairy tale of innovation and technological advancement sold to Americans has turned into a corporatist nightmare of censorship and hypocrisy. “
Lee has tracked Twitter, Google, and Facebook as anti-conservative biases for months. Last year he considered the possibility of breaking what he called monopolies from corporations because he said they “persistently censored” conservatives like Trump who banned Twitter “because of the risk of further inciting violence.” For example, last year Lee ordered companies to answer a series of questions about how and why they moderate or trim comments online – after attacking what he says is their distortion of public debate by making many conservatives unfair Brought silence. The companies insisted on their responses that they are not biased, but Lee didn’t buy it.
“The tech companies’ responses to conservative bias in their companies have been completely inconclusive,” Lee said at the time. “I remain concerned about the ideological discrimination in these companies and believe that more oversight will be needed to get the facts and answers the American people deserve.”
A recent report by New York University researchers found no grounds for allegations of corporate bias against conservative language, calling such allegations “a form of disinformation” that is not supported by evidence. Similarly, a study by Politico of millions of online posts last October found that conservative rule in social media, dominant black Lives Matter discussions, and election fraud – two of the hottest election debates.
Even so, Lee said Tuesday he remained concerned about what he calls “the soft totalitarianism of a corporate state.”
He said: “It is not the government’s monopoly of violence that today’s left punishes wrong thinking, but the economic monopoly of multinational corporations.”
Lee claimed that “antitrust authorities slept at the wheel as Silicon Valley transformed from an innovation hub to an acquisition hub. Instead of competing to be the next Google, Apple, Facebook or Amazon, today’s tech startups are being pushed by their private equity backers to sell to Google, Apple, Facebook or Amazon. “
He urged Congress to use its investigative and oversight functions to investigate and examine the health of competition across the economy.
Lee also said he will reintroduce antitrust enforcement consolidation legislation in the Justice Department, removing parts that are now shared with the Federal Trade Commission.
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