The Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution met Tuesday to discuss censorship with a panel of expert witnesses from the media and the law. Witnesses criticized what they called broad cooperation in years past between the government and nongovernmental organizations to suppress unfavored speech.
Mollie Hemingway, the editor-in-chief of The Federalist, contended that NGOs have often worked hand-in-hand with the government to remove politically incorrect content from the internet.
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“The government will work in partnership with NGOs on something like the Election Integrity Partnership, where they flag items for removal from social media companies,” said Hemingway.
“And so, they’re funding these NGOs. Sometimes, they’re actually flagging for the NGOs. The for-profit Big Tech companies will then remove the content,” Hemingway told Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt.
George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley spoke of what are thought to be instances of the government cooperating with organizations to control speech and warned that free speech is becoming an increasingly rare freedom across the world.
Journalist Benjamin Weingarten painted a similar picture in his claims of government-funded organizations enforcing censorship.
“Federally funded fact-checkers work with social media companies to algorithmically suppress disfavored media. Risk-raters, operating with the government’s imprimatur, create blacklists of such outlets to starve them of ad revenue,” said Weingarten.
“For-profits, too, often fueled by our tax dollars, develop analytics to support industrial-scale censorship. These entities have worked in overlapping and mutually reinforcing ways to control the American mind,” he said.
However, not all of the witnesses were on board with the idea of government-funded efforts to suppress speech.
Legal scholar Mary Anne Franks, for example, said, “The First Amendment does not constrain nongovernmental actors from making their own choices about what to say, what to hear, what to promote.”
She added, “The government also has its own rights of free speech, including the right to prefer certain viewpoints. It’s allowed to communicate those preferences through persuasion, encouragement, and even funding.”
The hearing became heated when Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., accused Franks of lacking objectivity, as he read several of her X posts from the past that indicated her strong liberal bent.
Kennedy read a post in which she said that “the majority of Americans hate women” and another in which she had accused what she regarded as a conservative-dominated Supreme Court of “white male supremacy.”
“And you expect us, as a Democratic witness, to take you seriously? Are you kidding me?” Kennedy said to Franks.
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