Senate GOP’s Call for Ideological Test In Hiring is Dangerous
By: Chris Lewis, President and CEO of Public Knowledge
During an October Senate Commerce Committee hearing on Section 230 and Big Tech, Senator Marsha Blackburn asked Google CEO Sundar Pichai if he had fired an engineer who had been critical of her on Twitter. At this week’s subsequent Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Senator Mike Lee suggested that because more Facebook employees donate to Democratic political candidates than Republicans, those same employees must be “censoring” conservatives, Republicans, and pro-life groups. He went so far as to claim that Facebook’s content moderation practices amount to “state-run media announcing the party line [rather] than a neutral company as it purports to be.”
This obsession with “anti-conservative bias” is often a cover to harass platforms into keeping up misinformation and disinformation. It also flies in the face of the actual evidence, which shows that conservative viewpoints are not taken down more often than liberal ones; and in fact conservative content often performs better on major platforms. Some Senate Republicans have a deep suspicion of people who work for social media companies, and have insinuated that companies need to do more to make sure their purportedly liberal workforce doesn’t influence content moderation decisions. One dangerous suggestion that is starting to gain traction is for major platforms to take affirmative steps in order to make sure their employee bases are more representative of the political affiliations of the country as a whole.
Mandating that the employees of any company have to represent some spectrum of political viewpoints is not based in any law, is not workable, and causes far more problems than it intends to solve. Ensuring a company like Facebook has diversity in political affiliations would require asking employees about their political views during the hiring process and throughout their employment. This process undoubtedly would be incredibly invasive and result in serious privacy violations. Moreover, people affiliate with a wide variety of political groups and individuals within these groups hold a broad range of viewpoints. Ideology is not just liberal and conservative — it is a spectrum, and research shows that many in the electorate hold liberal preferences on one dimension and conservative preferences on another. Who you vote for is ultimately a secret ballot and threats to one’s job based on that secret ballot is outright intimidation that can harm the right to vote.
The reason Facebook or Google’s content moderation decisions are so important to Republicans is that they recognize that these companies are the dominant modes of communication on the internet. If Facebook decides to remove your post, there isn’t much an individual can do about it. The social cost of leaving or being excluded from the platform is high. If Republicans want to see more variety in what kinds of content flourishes on the internet, they should be focusing on creating laws that encourage competitive choices for users.
Pro-competition policies mean that users could choose from a wide variety of social media sites on which to post, based on things like content moderation policies, the user interface, or the functionality of the site. Consumer choices have worked well in traditional media, despite aggressive efforts by television channels to fight disinformation that matches the efforts by Facebook and Twitter. Instead of lecturing the Big Tech companies that their efforts at fact-checking or labeling are “censorship,” Congress should be focusing on creating content-neutral laws that promote greater transparency, accountability, and due process for content moderation practices, and pro-competition policies that can empower user choices between the dominant platforms and smaller options. Platforms that do not fact check or label misinformation are already marketing themselves as the place to go to avoid community standards that a user might find too politically correct. Competition, not censorship, is the problem with the digital ecosystem.
