This post was originally published on RealClearPolitics.com.
Commentary by Harmeet Dhillon and Matthew Peterson.
It’s time to band together to protect digital speech from the tech monopolies before it’s too late. This isn’t about fringe outliers anymore. This is about whether or not Republicans ever win another major election in America. It’s about whether all Americans can freely argue their politics in public. Ultimately, it’s a battle over who will control the digital lens through which human beings now see the world.
Leading minds and voices on all sides know the stakes are high. Yet many argue Big Tech can be trusted not to misuse its powers, or that if it does, competitors will inevitably arise to erode the current monopolies. But anyone who believes legacy technology companies are not already crossing red lines is living in denial.
Since Donald Trump was elected president — fueled by a social media presence outstripping the competition — Twitter has banned users for far less than the content of many of Trump’s old tweets. Strategizing about how Trump and his supporters could have been marginalized on social media now drives Big Tech’s increasingly coordinated efforts to ban and censor users whose views run afoul of progressive ideology. Many of our elites now expect privately held technology companies to stop 2016 from happening again — or else.
