President Trump Hints "Countermove"

 

President Trump has been saying for years something has to be done about the out of control social media and search engines that have been censoring and removing conservatives for years. 

 Now that Americans are facing unprecedented levels of censorship of conservatives or Trump supporters, America is starting to push back.  These companies are seeing huge hits in their stock value and their are moves in play that will further damage these tech giants. 

Ted Cruz has been a leading critic of the big tech censorship and attacks on conservatives.  He recently tweeted, "Big Tech’s PURGE, censorship & abuse of power is absurd & profoundly dangerous. If you agree w/ Tech’s current biases (Iran, good; Trump, bad), ask yourself, what happens when you disagree? Why should a handful of Silicon Valley billionaires have a monopoly on political speech?” 

State Rep. Randy Fine wrote a letter to Governor Ron DeSantis requesting Florida divests assets dealing with Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Apple, and Alphabet (Google) due to their suspension of President Donald Trump's social media accounts and their moves to shut down social media platform Parler.  

Representative Fine also plans to introduce legislation to block any advertising in the State of Florida by these tech companies and stop all business dealings with them in the state of Florida. Florida is the third most populated state in the United States.

Since the social media bans Twitter has  lost 12 % or $3.4b in market value and Facebook has lost 34 billion, so far.

President Trump said (about the recent and ongoing censorship from social media and Google), "It was a big mistake but there's always a counter move." Clearly the president will exact his revenge and now has been substantiated in his move to regulate technology anti-Trump colluders..

Representative Fine made a flawless argument when he pointed out, 

"It is clear that Twitter and Facebook are engaged in one-sided viewpoint discrimination targeting conservatives," Fine wrote. "These companies allow actual terrorists around the world to use their platforms to target America, Americans, and our allies, without as much as a peep."

One Idaho internet service provider will implement firewalls that restrict access to Facebook and Twitter at its customers’ requests.  The company sites many requests angry with the tech censorship stated these households wanted no part of these platforms being used in their homes. 

Republican lawmakers and President Trump have been pushing  to reform Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a 1996 landmark federal law that acts as a legal shield for online platforms from material posted by their users, preventing them from being treated as publishers.

Some lawmakers believe  social media platforms should lose protections if they operate as a publisher and not a neutral platform.

There's a pretty good chance the tech giants will face the consequences of their censorship of millions of Americans including the president. And the short-term they will lose billions of dollars and will lose a substantial amount of activity on their platforms.  it is hard to know if they will ever recover from there choice to censor based on ideological persuasions. 

https://nypost.com/2020/10/15/fcc-moves-to-clarify-section-230-law-after-censoring-of-post-story/

https://founderscode.com/states-begin-to-push-back-on-big-tech-censorship/

https://www.floridatoday.com/story/news/2021/01/12/rep-randy-fine-asks-florida-governor-divest-public-investments-tech-companies-censoring-conservative/6637829002/