Democrat presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren has positioned herself as a critic of Silicon Valley and even criticized tech censorship in the recent past — but now she’s reversed her stance, calling for more policing of lawful speech by the unaccountable Masters of the Universe in Silicon Valley.
In March, Warren called out Facebook for its “ability to shut down a debate.” The context was Facebook’s decision to temporarily take down several of her posts that called for the breakup of the tech giant.
The text of her proposal to break up big tech calls for the designation of major tech platforms as “platform utilities,” that would be required to “meet a standard of fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory dealing with users” — if this was meant in good faith, it would mean that users couldn’t be discriminated against on the basis of their political viewpoints or opinions.
But Warren doesn’t actually believe that.
Far from opposing big tech’s ability to, in her words, “shut down a debate,” she fully supports it — when the debate has been started by someone she disagrees with.
Warren recently called on big tech to crack down on speech she disagrees with, after black Twitter user Ali Alexander questioned whether Kamala Harris, a second-generation Jamaican-Indian, could fully lay claim to the American black identity.
Warren today took to Twitter called the insinuation “racist and ugly” and reminded tech companies that they could “stop these vile lies dead in their tracks.”
Instead of simply challenging or denouncing the claim in an open marketplace of ideas, Warren went further — she wants tech companies to exercise greater control over that marketplace, so that rogue ideas can never spread in the first place.
In other words, Warren doesn’t really oppose corporate censorship. Like many of her Democrat colleagues, she simply wants the right kind of corporate censorship.
Are you a source at a Big Tech company or any other corporation who wants to confidentially blow the whistle on wrongdoing or political bias at your company? Reach out to Allum Bokhari securely at allumbokhari@protonmail.com.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News.