Op-Ed: Joe Rogan controversy is reminder that censorship laws are bad idea that will backfire

Carl Szabo | NetChoice

Spotify’s decision to resist calls by powerful voices to remove Joe Rogan from its platform offers a good reminder that Americans must firmly reject government interference in private business decisions, including social media companies.

Coverage of Neil Young and Joni Mitchell have buried far more concerning voices attacking Spotify for hosting Rogan: those coming from the Biden administration.

Administration officials calling for censorship of dissenting voices, as U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has done, should outrage all Americans. Yet this is the kind of government power state governors across the U.S. are trying to capture with social media regulations.

Last year, courts blocked legislation in Texas and Florida to prevent social media companies from monitoring content on their platforms but 19 other states have followed with bills in the same vein.

Legislatures from coast to coast including Kentucky, California, Utah, Iowa, Arizona, Georgia, Tennessee, New York, Alabama, Indiana, South Carolina, Michigan, Ohio, W. Virginia, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Mississippi, and Idaho are considering similarly unconstitutional bills.

Such bills are a flagrant assault on the First Amendment, effectively putting government officials in control of online speech and private businesses. This is exactly the kind of control Murthy and other government officials crave, and the kind of government control Americans must fight.

It’s not just a bad idea from a Constitutional standard, it’s a bad policy idea to have the government determine what information is suitable for Americans to see online.

These bills are being sold as a way to prohibit social media businesses like Facebook and Twitter from removing conservative content.

While this may be appealing to some, what it would mean in practice is that the government would determine what private businesses can and can’t say. That means Murthy’s tweets would become commands.

Facebook, Twitter, and other social media companies are private businesses and as frustrated as conservatives are that some conservative speech is removed.

Frustration and ire have sparked the rise of conservative social media platforms like Rumble, Parler, and Trump’s new platform, and that is exactly the result the free market enables.

And just like Facebook and Twitter, these conservative social media sites shouldn’t be forced by the government to host content they don’t want like opinions from Rachel Maddow or Elizabeth Warren.

Inviting the government in to be the referee and create the rules of the game is wrong headed and illegal. If conservative states were able to tell social media sites what news and views they can host, so could liberal states.

This is not a hypothetical threat to free speech. A bill introduced in New York state this year would punish social media sites for hosting alleged misinformation. Clearly, access to information should never be determined by the political party in power.

And censorship is only one of the threats social media censorship bills pose to private businesses.

They would also strip social media companies of the freedom to remove content at their discretion.

These bills would make it illegal for Facebook and Twitter to remove content that most of us don’t want to see – or want our children to see – like hate speech, violent content, X-rated content, and more.

Despite conservatives’ frustration about social media censorship, we cannot allow private businesses to become vessels for the government’s preferred messaging.

Both blue and red states have realized the internet’s power and want to harness it for their own agendas – and are seizing on the opportunity to use public frustration to seize more power.

I will continue to fight tooth and nail against legislation that violates First Amendment protections that prevent lawmakers from using the government’s coercive powers to settle scores against America’s leading technology businesses.

At the end of the day, whether it is the Biden Administration telling Joe Rogan what not to say, or the state-level administrations telling Facebook what it must say, we should all let private businesses decide what is best for their customers and let us vote with our feet – not let politicians dictate to us the speech we should hear.

Carl Szabo is vice president and general counsel for NetChoice.