What do Big Tech liability protections have to do with defense spending? Plenty, according to President Donald Trump, which is why he’s demanding a repeal of Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act be included in the annual defense authorization bill or he will veto it.
The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is already in compromise negotiation for a final version in Congress, and does not include a repeal of Section 230.
Trump now says the repeal is essential to national security and election integrity, and has demanded it be included in the bill.
Members of his party are wondering how Big Tech liability fits into defense spending and are balking at including the repeal.
GOP pushes back
“230 has nothing to do with the military,” Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman James Inhofe (R-OK) said. “I agree with his sentiments … but you can’t do it in this bill. That’s not a part of the bill.”
“I would hope that he would not actually follow through with that because the NDAA is critical,” Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD) said about the demand for the repeal.
Trump knows that if he doesn’t get Section 230 repealed before he could be forced out of office, Democrats will sideline it and Big Tech censorship will get even worse by the next election.
The impact on the 2020 election was real: a post-election poll showed that the censorship of stories about Hunter Biden’s emails and other stories that hurt Biden or helped Trump blinded enough voters to sway the election in Biden’s favor, barring unlikely but possible Supreme Court actions to overturn the current vote totals.
Voters would have changed their votes
The poll by the Media Research Center said that 17% of voters–far more than enough to re-elect Trump–would have changed their votes if they had known about one of eight stories censored by Google, Facebook and Twitter in the weeks before the election.
Big Tech has become a monster that influences public opinion rather than merely giving it a platform, and no longer deserves the liability protections given to it at its inception.
The protections given in Section 230 were meant to shield it from liability only so long as it remained a platform that allowed all opinions to be shown. No one can argue that Big Tech is still neutral–the agenda is obvious and provable.
Just try to Google “poll voters hunter biden emails,” for instance. The article about the poll cited above doesn’t appear anywhere in search results, while on Yahoo search, it is third on the list and the top five results refer to the poll directly.
Trump is to be applauded for doing whatever it takes to get Section 230 repealed while he still has the power to do so. If he fails, Republicans may never win the presidency again.
The post Trump says he won't sign defense bill unless it includes big tech liability repeal first appeared on Conservative Institute.
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