I do find it amusing the ol' claim that Gmail censors conservatives by putting R's campaign emails in the spam folder.

But I mean, look at it. That's the spammiest looking email i've ever seen.

Fortunately Senator Rosen is bringing us back on topic - discussing the very real and present jawboning happening RIGHT NOW! Threatening broadcast licenses, taking away press credentials, forcing universities to adhere to ideological requirements as a condition of federal grants !

Senator Blackburn is grilling Google about its LLM Gemma having false outputs, and calls for Google to take down the chat bot.

This comes with a question about why Google targets conservative speech.

The Senator, while complaining about censorship, calls for taking down another speech platform

to be clear, senators have 1A rights too and can express frustration over bad content policy. But Cruz is ultimately complaining about Google using their own 1A expressive right to moderate content !

Sen. Cruz pressing Google about their content moderation decision regarding election fraud claims , and complaining about it being a bad policy, is … also pressuring platforms and in his logic could be jawboning !

Harold’s written testimony is here lays out : if you care about the First Amendment, let’s talk about the threats to free speech happening right now - at the hands of ostensibly independent agency heads acting according to the President’s personal grievances

Harm to Berenson wouldn't have been so severe after he was deplatformed on Twitter for his Covid stuff if he could easily take his content AND his followers to another platform with more favorable content policies.

The throughline between Berenson & Davis's grievances is what Kimmelman reiterated: there are just a handful of people who have immense influence over our speech — both in how we express ourselves and how we consume information.

But its not productive to keep rehashing the complex election integrity & covid era public health efforts 5 years ago. Biden will never be prez again. "Censorship Cartel" rhetoric has Meta/Google/X under a vice grip. No content mod. decisions will be made w/o intense scrutiny.

It's obvious Davis is upset he cant spread racist & xenophobic vitriol with reckless abandon. But I'm actually sympathetic to Berenson's case. As a journalist, Twitter was a crucial platform for him. & he was deplatformed from his primary communications locus for opaque reasons.

But the fact of the matter is, while agencies like CISA had some contact with major platforms, these platforms asserted they made content mod. decisions independently. Yet the "conservative censorship cartel" rhetoric pushed these platforms to remove content mod. protections & wash their hands of it

Gene Kimmelman points to too few people have full control on "turning on the microphone" and controlling the flow of information. Thats core to Sean Davis and Alex Berenson's grievances .

Sen. Cantwell recalls hearing in which a Meta whistleblower explained how hate speech is lifted bc it results in more engagement and thus more ad dollars. Follows Sen. Klobuchar's remarks about the flood of violent speech on X. Point is content moderation is needed, AND should be transparency

Unfortunately, Sen. Fischer conflates fact checking with censorship. Adding more context to a post ADDS speech, so i'm not sure why this censorship rhetoric persists. Being told you're wrong could be annoying, but not censorship.

This is fundamentally a messaging issue. Many users do not understand what content moderation is, why its important (unless you think all platforms should be 4chan hellholes), and why at scale content moderation so often misses the mark when dealing with millions of posts.

But bc of "conservative censorship complex" rhetoric, anytime someone is dinged by a Facebook/Reddit/X for violating platform ToS, so many immediately assume gvmt censorship. Take a look at comments in the FTC "Big Tech Censorship" docket to get an idea :

I dont necessarily think Cruz asking for some transparency into fed. government engagements with social media platforms & making it easier for citizens to report if they've been subjected to jawboning is a bad thing (barring sensitive natl. security matters).

In any case, Cruz is using this report, the FCC Kimmel blowback, & the hearing to put energy behind a coming bill that would "make it easier for to sue the government for censorship"