DeSantis Sets Sights On Big Tech Censorship

The Republican governor of Florida has announced that his administration will look into Big Tech censorship. Gov. Ron DeSantis told an audience in Austin, Texas that Florida is considering ways to respond to technology firms’ recent censorship. DeSantis stated that the role Big Tech companies play in the lives of Americans made the issue “much more pressing.”

DeSantis made the remarks during a keynote luncheon hosted by the Texas Public Policy Foundation. The governor commented that tech companies censoring reports specifically from the New York Post bothered him. “I was very disturbed to see credible articles [from the Post] about Hunter Biden actively suppressed by these Big Tech oligarchs … [which] had an impact on the presidential election,” he said.

The Florida governor said the events that unfolded since the beginning of 2021 were “really chilling.” DeSantis referenced Twitter’s banning of President Donald Trump, which he called a “big deal.” However, the governor said that the actions toward alternative social media platform Parler bothered him more than Trump’s suspension.

DeSantis explained that Parler was a response to Twitter’s conservative censorship. The platform had gained traction in recent months, with users jumping there from Twitter. But Apple and Google have since removed Parler from their app store and Amazon terminated the site’s web hosting contract on its servers.

Dubbing the actions toward Parler as a “coordinated assault,” DeSantis condemned the Big Tech oligarchy as being “more powerful than the government itself.”

The governor warned that Big Tech firms were already “serving as judge, jury and executioner with no due process” and could “effectively wipe someone’s livelihood off the map.”

Given these actions by Big Tech, DeSantis put forward protections for people against Big Tech. “I think there needs to be protections for people. I don’t think we can have a couple of these far-left-wing tech oligarchs control the information in our country. I’m not going to accept that and I don’t think any of you are going to accept that. So, we’re thinking through what we can do to provide people some protections,” the governor elaborated.

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