Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis said Thursday he would have “zero tolerance” for the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security “colluding” with social media companies if he is elected president.
United States District Judge Terry A. Doughty of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana issued an injunction Tuesday prohibiting Biden administration officials with multiple agencies, including the FBI and the Department of Health and Human Services, from contacting social media companies to push for “the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech.” “I think it was a massive abuse of power,” DeSantis told Newsmax host Chris Salcedo.
DeSantis said, “We’re going to clean all of that out as president. If you are colluding and you’re in the FBI or DHS or these with tech, you’re going to get canned, you’re going to be shown the door, we’re going to have zero tolerance for that, because it really strikes at the fundamentals of a free society.”
WATCH:
Doughty listed 25 instances where social media companies either censored or were pressured to censor by the Biden administration, according a thread on Twitter posted by Justin Hart, author of the Covid Reasoning newsletter on Substack.
Tucker Carlson, a co-founder of the Daily Caller and Daily Caller News Foundation, was among those targeted for censorship by the Biden administration, according to an April 14, 2021 email from then-White House Director of Digital Strategy Rob Flaherty to an unidentified Facebook employee, demanding the company censor Carlson’s video about vaccines released in January of that year.
“We think it’s fundamental, that you have a right to speak and these companies engage in a lot of censorship, that’s problematic in and of itself, because they’re monopolies, and then they get liability protection under the idea that they’re open marketplaces,” DeSantis said. “But as we see they apply terms of service disfavorably against conservative voices, so even tech censorship in itself’ is a big issue that we’re going to tackle as president, and we want to make sure everyone has the ability to speak.”
“But when the federal government colludes to be able to get Big Tech to censor, “that is absolutely a violation of the First Amendment,” DeSantis continued. “This judge was absolutely right. You can’t do indirectly what the First Amendment would forbid you to do directly. So it’s a gross abuse of power.”
The Biden administration announced it would appeal Doughty’s ruling Wednesday.
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