The US House Judiciary Committee’s tenacious, multi-year effort to expose the inner mechanisms of online censorship, and attempt to remedy any anti-constitutional transgressions of this nature, continues.
And while the focus in the previous years, during the Biden administration, had for the most part been on the US government-Big Tech collusion, this is now being expanded to look into how foreign governments may also have interfered – or are continuing to do that – with Americans’ free speech.
To this end, Committee Chairman Jim Jordan just this week issued a number of subpoenas – to Google (Alphabet), Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Rumble, TikTok, and X – asking each company to submit documents relevant to the questions regarding their possible compliance with foreign efforts to curtail speech, that might have affected US users as well.
According to the announcement made by Jordan, this could cover the companies working to meet censorship laws abroad, stemming from various regulations, judicial orders, “or other government-initiated efforts.”
Jordan’s letters to each of the said companies fairly comprehensively touched on the various instances of censorship-driven legislation abroad over the last few years.
We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.
And it’s not just Brazil, even though it is now once again in the spotlight after last year’s high-profile “showdown” with X – these crises are always driven by Alexandre de Moraes.
“Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes has issued secret, lawless orders forcing American companies to remove large amounts of content or face fines and be banned from the country,” one of the letters reads.
But the subpoenas are not leaving out the UK, Australia, or the EU.
Jordan says these are “unelected regulators imposing rules.” Those rules are declaratively there to combat disinformation and harmful content – while the actual point appears to be to threaten tech companies with massive fines unless they fall in line.
But Jordan didn’t forget to put Australia, and Canada, on notice, too.
“The Australian government introduced legislation that would require American platforms to globally remove posts that Australian regulators deem to ‘misleading or deceptive’,” a letter says – a reference to the Communications Legislation Amendment (Combating Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2024.
Regarding Canada’s Online Harms Act (Bill C-63), Jordan had this to remark: “Lawmakers in the Canadian Parliament introduced an Orwellian thoughtcrime bill that would permit Canadian authorities to place individuals on house arrest for up to a year if a judge determines that the individual might say something ‘likely to foment detestation or vilification of an individual or group of individuals’.”
Some of the bill’s provisions include house arrest or internet bans for people the authorities “fear” may commit a “hate propaganda of offense” or “hate crime” in the future – and the draft seems to provide for retroactive implementations.
And in the EU, there’s the DSA.
“Because many social media platforms generally maintain one set of content moderation policies that they apply globally, the most restrictive censorship laws may set de facto global censorship standards, even without these specific threats from foreign officials. In other words, there may be a global race to the bottom where free speech is concerned,” Jordan writes.
The chairman notes that the subpoenas are necessary in order to have tech companies “disclose documents to the Committee without interference by foreign governments.”
