The House Republican majority is finally on track, and newly elected Speaker Kevin McCarthy (CA) has made big promises about what his leadership means for big tech companies, including a new subcommittee charged with investigating censorship allegations. .
This new panel, called the Federal Government Select Subcommittee on Armaments, has been empowered to pursue any perceived wrongdoing by the Biden administration’s GOP against conservatives, including overseeing ongoing federal investigations into former President Donald Trump. While Republicans have vowed to investigate everything from the origins of the new coronavirus to Hunter Biden’s laptop, the new panel could also become the epicenter of their investigations into “Big Tech” and its alleged censorship of conservatives.
Assuming the Judiciary Committee’s speech and gavel this month, McCarthy and the expected panel chair Jim Jordan (R-OH)they will become some of the most powerful leaders in the Republican Party in their battle against Big Tech. But while the pair have championed fighting alleged platform bias and reforming Section 230, they have repeatedly opposed the bipartisan antitrust measures that critics say would significantly reduce the power of platforms to restrict speech.
“McCarthy and Jordan are doing Big Tech’s bidding, and I don’t trust this to change”
“Unless they support bipartisan antitrust reform, the rest of their work at Big Tech is performative,” Mike Davis, head of the right-wing advocacy group the Internet Accountability Project, said in an interview Tuesday. “McCarthy and Jordan are doing Big Tech’s bidding, and I don’t trust this to change.”
Jordan, a McCarthy ally and member of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, has risen from the GOP periphery to leadership positions in recent years as the party aligns more closely with Trump. Jordan has done countless foxnews Y Newsmax appearances attacking online platform moderation regimes as biased and, more recently, has sounded alarm bells over the “Twitter Files” revelations about alleged collusion between the Biden campaign and Twitter to censor stories like the New York Post Original coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop.
December 14Jordan wrote letters to five of the biggest tech companies, including Meta and Google, demanding that they turn over all correspondence between their companies and officials in the Biden administration once he took command of the Judiciary Committee in January.
“While the full extent of Big Tech’s collusion with the Biden administration is unknown, there are prominent examples and strong indications of censorship by Big Tech following directives or pressure from executive branch entities,” Jordan wrote. “Because of Big Tech’s broad reach, it can serve as a powerful and effective partisan arm of the ‘wake talk police.'”
Despite alarmist rhetoric about the power of Big Tech over the pitch, Jordan has repeatedly opposed moves to curb the companies’ market dominance. Throughout the last Congress, House Democrats led a sweeping 16-month investigation into four major tech companies: Amazon, Apple, Meta and Google. They issued a final report in 2021 detailing the ways companies could illegally maintain their market dominance and have introduced several bills to reform antitrust laws to better regulate the industry. Jordan offered dissenting views to the report, arguing that its findings could “revise antitrust laws that apply to all sectors of the US economy.”
Jordan once again came out against antitrust reform in september, opposing a bill that would increase the fees tech companies must pay when they file an upcoming merger with the federal government. Jordan said the proposal amounted to free money for the Federal Trade Commission and its leader, Lina Khan, who has turned the agency into a “platform for activism.”
“Both McCarthy and Jordan like to complain about Big Tech for the TV cameras, but behind the scenes, they’re more or less helping Big Tech lobbyists tick everything off their wish lists,” Evan Greer, director of Fight for the Future, a digital rights group, said in an interview Monday. “This is very much about the grievance politics of complaining about the restriction of speech by tech companies while doing absolutely nothing to reduce their power.”
“It’s very much about the grievance politics of complaining about tech companies’ restriction of speech while doing absolutely nothing to reduce their power.”
Tackling tech censorship had been a McCarthy priority since September last year when he launched his “Engagement with America” platform, a list of promises republicans made to voters before the midterm elections in November. In it, McCarthy said a GOP House majority would “confront Big Tech and promote free speech” by repealing Section 230 and strengthening antitrust enforcement.
But it’s unclear how McCarthy plans to tackle antitrust laws, as of publication. Following the introduction of bipartisan-backed reform bills in 2021, McCarthy announced his opposition to the package A McCarthy spokesman said The Wall Street Journal while the then minority leader would offer an alternative proposal.
Outside of tech reform, the House Republican majority is busy with other partisan priorities in this Congress. In particular, the clashes between the Democrats and the Republican Party over the US debt ceiling could prolong debates on technology reform. Experts aren’t entirely sure when it will hit the ceiling., but the deadline could be as soon as this summer. Negotiations to raise or limit that ceiling could take weeks or months, especially since McCarthy vowed to fight an increase during his run for president.
“I don’t think any of this will end up as legislation,” Katie Harbath, the executive director of Anchor Change and a former director of public policy for Facebook, said of the new subcommittee in an interview Monday. “I don’t think Congress really gets its act together.”
