Hawley hammers White House as ‘really scary’ for pushing Facebook to 'censor' COVID posts

The federal government has launched a campaign to flag Facebook posts it deems "misinformation" on COVID-19, a decision which Sen. Josh Hawley, R-MO., described as "really scary" on "Special Report" Thursday.

Hawley: I think it's scary. I think it's really scary to have the federal government of the United States, the White House, compiling lists of people, organizations, whatever, and then going to a private company that, by the way, is a monopoly, Facebook, and saying you need to censor, you need to do something about this, you need to tell these users, these private users at a private company what they can or cannot say. I mean, I just think that this kind of coordination between big government and the big monopoly corporation, boy, that is scary stuff. And it really is censorship.

At this point, you really have to wonder how private of companies they are. I mean, if you're taking direction from the federal government, openly coordinating with the federal government, you've got the government saying, ‘we think that this speech ought to be censored,’ and big tech, they carry out those instructions. I mean, that looks like they're starting to operate as a public utility. And there are many people out there who say we ought to just treat them as public utilities. We ought to just regulate these private companies as such. My view is we ought to break them up and restore competition. But I have to tell you, their status as independent private companies looks more and more endangered here. They're acting like arms of the government. And when they're monopolies, that's a big problem.

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