Ted Cruz was shouting at Jack Dorsey.
“Who the hell elected you and put you in charge of what the media are allowed to report and what the American people are allowed to hear?” The Republican senator from Texas was yelling at the Twitter CEO during a congressional hearing on speech moderation on Wednesday. According to Cruz, Twitter, Facebook, and Google represented “the single greatest threat to free speech in America and the greatest threat we have to free and fair elections.”
The moment could have passed as just another empty symbol of the culture war: a GOP politician insisting against all evidence that conservatives are censored online. But as the Republican war on Big Tech intensifies, conservatives have embraced the idea of directly regulating speech on social media in ways that would have once been unthinkable for the party of small government. The Trump administration has already laid the legal groundwork for the Federal Communications Commission to regulate social media, and it seems a lock that a Trump reelection would bring with it a new role for the agency: national internet moderator.
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Source: Meet Brendan Carr, the right’s regulator in chief – The Verge