Pennsylvania State Senators Doug Mastriano (R-Gettysburg) and Scott Hutchinson (R-Oil City) Thursday announced they would reintroduce a bill proposed in the last legislative session designed to prevent social media platforms from censoring Pennsylvanians.
Mastriano and Hutchinson introduced the original measure in May 2021. They secured the cosponsorship of four other senators, all Republicans, but the bill did not receive a vote in the Senate Consumer Protection and Professional Licensure Committee. The two lawmakers said new developments impelled them to try again in the new session. They cited the recently released “Twitter files,” internal documents pertaining largely to the social-media company’s decision in late 2020 to deny users access to a New York Post story concerning Joe Biden’s son Hunter’s personal computer.
Critics of Twitter’s leadership before the platform’s acquisition by Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk have decried the corporation’s decision to bar posts of the report that the younger Biden introduced his then-Vice President father to a major Ukrainian energy executive. Less than one year after that meeting, the vice president urged Ukrainian officials to dismiss a prosecutor investigating that executive’s firm.
The files also revealed that Yael Roth, who then served as Twitter’s global head for trust and safety, mentioned meeting with administrators of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Homeland Security, and the National Intelligence Program about the laptop story and disputes about the 2020 presidential election. Twitter policies ultimately resulted in the temporary locking of the New York Post’s account, the banning of former President Donald Trump from the platform, and the exclusion of numerous high-profile users who dissented regarding the government’s COVID-19 policies.
“Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter has revealed what many of us had already known,” the sponsors wrote in a memorandum describing their legislation. “According to recently released internal documents, big tech executives coordinated weekly with the federal government to ban users and censor political speech which they deemed as ‘disinformation.’ The new documents also revealed that Twitter used blacklists and ‘visibility filters’ to interfere with user searches or ‘shadow-ban’ individuals and prevent their tweets from trending.”
Mastriano and Hutchinson noted that some federal legislators upset with social media hostility toward conservatives want to change Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to remove liability protections that social media companies enjoy. The senators contend that states are also free to take their own action as well.
Their bill would let Pennsylvania residents sue “a large social media platform” if the application “purposely deletes or censors the user’s political speech and/or uses an algorithm to shadow ban.” The measure would also force major social-media apps to explain in writing to users the reasons they have been banned or censored. The proposal also contains a mandate that the companies “publish and consistently apply” their rules regarding speech, censorship and de-platforming.
Free-speech advocates, however, might not unanimously favor the legislation. Joe Cohn, legislative and policy director at the nonprofit Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) said he believes that social media companies have constitutional interests in free speech and association.
“The social-media platforms have First Amendment rights of their own, so FIRE is deeply skeptical of the constitutionality of legislation that would regulate how they moderate content on their platforms,” he told The Pennsylvania Daily Star. “Under the First Amendment, private actors can decide what they’re going to say and what they’re not going to say and content-moderation policies of social-media companies warrant First Amendment protection as well.”
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Bradley Vasoli is managing editor of The Pennsylvania Daily Star. Follow Brad on Twitter at @BVasoli. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Doug Mastriano” by Doug Mastriano.
