A new Senate bill would establish a new federal agency in charge of social media. Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren and Republican Senator Lindsay Graham put forward the bill. It would establish the Digital Consumer Protection Commission to police, censor and deplatform social media as the government sees fit.
Already I don’t like it.
The new commission would give the federal government the power to declare some websites as “dominant platforms” and require those platforms to have government licenses. It could also revoke that license for what it declares is repeated misconduct.
It would also give the government the power over content moderation. Given what we have seen from the Twitter Files and Facebook Files about how the government has reached into social media to demand speech censorship, it is no wonder the government wants to get rid of the middle man and just police speech itself. A recent federal ruling makes government collusion with social media illegal and the Justice Department is trying to appeal that.
A similar bill was introduced in May called the Digital Platform Commission Act of 2023. Congress is not going to stop trying to control social media.
