Texas making an argument to prevent Big Tech censorship would be 'difficult': Entrepreneur
Biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy discusses Texas leaders working on a bill prevent Big Tech censorship.
Texas has a huge mountain to climb to curtail Big Tech's power of squelching free speech, biotech entrepreneur and author Vivek Ramaswamy argued on Tuesday.
"Texas’s heart is in the right place, but there's one particular issue, which is that the way that Section 230 is structured, that's a federal law, is that it says explicitly that you're preempting or overriding any liability that these companies might face in state courts, so, their heart's in the right place. But in order to really deliver the right solution here, this has to be done at the federal level," Vivek Ramaswamy told "Fox & Friends."
Ramaswamy, author of a forthcoming book called "Woke Inc.", asserted that the Civil Rights Act needs to be amended to prohibit political discrimination.
"Just like there's no religious discrimination or discrimination on the basis of national origin," Ramaswamy said.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced his office is working with State Sen. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola, on legislation that would "prevent social media providers like Facebook & Twitter from canceling conservative speech."
"We filed a bill about this during the last session two years ago, it passed the Senate did not make it through the House," Hughes told WFAA’s Inside Texas Politics in an interview on Sunday. "So the bill we’re getting ready to file will say that if a company discriminates against you, deplatforms you, blocks you, kicks you off based on your viewpoint, based on your politics, your religion, based on viewpoint discrimination, it will give you a way to get back online."
According to Hughes, the previous bill looked at different options for how users can bring discrimination lawsuits against the social media giants.
"What we would like to do is to give any Texan who's being discriminated against, the option to bring an action and we think that will get Facebook's attention, get Twitter's attention, and cause them to start treating Texans fairly," Hughes added.
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Ramaswamy explained further that work needs to be done on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
"We need to amend Section 230 itself to say that political censorship is off the table or take this to federal court,
"As I argued on the show in the past, saying that these companies are actually bound by the First Amendment based on case law. I like where his heart is at, but it's going to be a very difficult argument because it's just one state trying to override a federal statute."
FOX Business' Lucas Manfredi contributed to this report.
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