Sen. Josh Hawley proposes stripping Twitter of liability immunity
Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, joins Laura Ingraham on 'The Ingraham Angle.'
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Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley called on lawmakers to revoke the old liability law granted to social media platforms, which protects the digital forums from bearing responsibility for content shared by its users.
"They are free from liability, free from suit," Hawley, R-Mo., explained. "They get a special immunity. If they are going to act like regular publishers, if Twitter is going to editorialize about the president of the United States, they ought to be treated like a regular publisher and that’s what my deal would do."
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Hawley made the comment on "The Ingraham Angle" on Wednesday in response to Twitter's unprecedented move to attach a fact-check notification to one of President Trump's tweets, cautioning users that despite the president’s claims about mail-in voting, “fact-checkers” say there is “no evidence” that it would increase fraud risks.
"They pick on the president, Twitter did this time," Hawley said, calling out Facebook and Google for doing much of the same. "These guys really all do this stuff. They’ve just gotten by on it."
Hawley continued, "They are editorializing, they are censoring, they are making judgments. They claim 'we aren’t like traditional media, we are neutral, we don’t have any opinions, we post other people's opinions.' It just isn’t true," he argued, "and it’s time to start calling them out on it."
Referencing a "Daily Briefing" interview in which Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg knocked Twitter and cautioned them against acting as the "arbiter of truth," Hawley said "Zuckerberg is clearly quite eager to throw Twitter under the bus" because he "doesn’t want to lose immunities for Facebook."
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"They want to keep their special deal," he explained. "I’m surprised Google isn’t out there doing the same thing."
Hawley's bill would also address Twitter's policy that allowed the Chinese Foreign Ministry to express "outright lies and falsehoods" surrounding the origins of the coronavirus, he explained.
"How about the Chinese Foreign Ministry who have been on Twitter ... saying that United States soldiers actually started the coronavirus," he said. "Twitter has not had a word to say about any of these things. This is not a joke, this is Twitter showing its political bias. If they want to editorialize like The New York Times, go right ahead. It’s a free country," he asserted, "they are a free company." But, Hawley added, "they should not get a special deal from government because of it."
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