The federal government should move to break up Big Tech companies like Facebook in response to what Republicans describe as censorship of conservative speech, Sen. Josh Hawley said Wednesday.
“The real problem with Facebook is the monopoly power that they enjoy,” Hawley told the Washington Examiner in an exclusive interview. “Nobody would particularly care about Facebook’s censorious actions if there were rival competitors that actually had a legitimate shot at taking away customers, but there’s not.”
Facebook drew fierce criticism from the Right on Wednesday when its oversight board decided to uphold a ban on former President Donald Trump over content he posted nearly four months ago, in the moments just before and after his supporters rioted violently at the U.S. Capitol.
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Hawley, author of The Tyranny of Big Tech, argued companies like Facebook have benefited from immunities in federal law — such as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which Trump urged lawmakers to repeal — that shield them from liability for leaving up certain kinds of content while allowing them to take down other kinds that they don’t like, such as conservative speech.
Rather than impose new rules on Big Tech, however, Hawley argued antitrust laws should be used to break those entities up.
“I would prefer to break up the companies and allow competition to flourish in the market as opposed to regulating them as arms of the government,” Hawley said.
“We need new laws, I think, that make it clear that these companies can’t consolidate whole industries under their control, that they can’t acquire any new companies, and they need to spin off their subsidiaries,” Hawley said.
Conservatives have long balked at government intervention in the free market — but Hawley said Republicans should see antitrust action as ultimately serving the ideals of the free market.
“I’d see that as a market-reinforcing move, a pro-competition move,” he said.
Twitter and Facebook stripped Trump of his accounts after the former president made a series of statements on social media that critics characterized as an incitement to violence at the Capitol building.
Conservatives balked at what they saw as the latest and most egregious example of Big Tech companies limiting the speech of conservatives in the name of preventing misinformation or protecting public safety.
“I think one of the reasons that the woke mentality and the cancel culture that it helps feed — why that is so troubling is because of the power that these companies have,” Hawley said. “The monopoly status of these companies makes their political interventions much more salient and much more troubling.”
But Hawley acknowledged the industry’s culture is unlikely to change even if courts successfully ruled that Big Tech companies should be split up under beefed-up antitrust laws.
“Would breaking up the companies change the views of their CEOs, the woke views of their CEOs? No, probably not,” Hawley said. “But hopefully, it would inject some competition, and hopefully, you might get some new entrants into the market.”
The Missouri Republican introduced a bill last month that would, among other things, lower the standard for bringing an antitrust case and stop social media companies from gobbling up competitors.
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Democrats, on the other hand, have heaped pressure on Big Tech companies to curb the kind of misinformation that spread in the wake of the 2020 election, when conspiracy theories about the election results fueled the kind of anger that led to the Jan. 6 riots.
But conservatives have argued that the social media companies apply their standards disproportionately against Republican-friendly speech while leaving untouched posts that could be similarly interpreted as deceptions or incitements if they contain Democratic-friendly speech.
