Madison Cawthorn, then a candidate for Congress in North Carolina, addresses the Republican National Convention on Aug. 26, 2020.
Twitter led the charge to permanently shut down President Trump‘s account, and the backlash from that action is still festering. Newly elected U.S. Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-CA) announced that he co-sponsored a proposal to amend Section 230 to ensure that big tech companies uphold the free speech rights of American consumers.
In a tweet on Tuesday (Jan. 12), Rep. Cawthorn, a North Carolina Republican, wrote: “I am co-sponsoring a proposal to amend Section 230 to require the application of First Amendment protections to Big Tech!”
Section 230 is part of the Communications Codes Act (CDA), passed in 1996, which largely protects big tech companies from legal action over the content of their websites.
The bill, which Cawthorne referred to in his tweet, was introduced by Republican Rep. Greg Steube of Florida, according to the Epoch Times (English edition).
The bill states that big tech providers would lose their current Section 230 immunity from liability if they are dominant in their markets and make content review decisions based on policies that are not in line with the First Amendment.
On January 8 of this year, Twitter Inc. permanently shut down the account of the current U.S. President Donald Trump on its Twitter site, and then joined forces with Apple and Google Inc. to remove Parler, a social platform App that was seen as an alternative to Twitter, from their respective app stores, followed by Amazon’s removal of Parler from its web hosting service. The big tech companies justified the series of actions on the grounds that they believed Trump and his supporters had posted, or were likely to post, statements that incited violence, but such rhetoric was widely refuted and opposed by Republicans and Trump supporters.
In an interview with Fox News last week, Cawthorne recalled a quote written by author George R.R. Martin, who said, “When you rip out the tongues of those who oppose you, you don’t prove that they are liars. Instead, you simply prove yourself paralyzed by fear at the altar of suppression, and prove your fear of what they are about to say to you.”
In response to news that Twitter has permanently blocked the accounts of 60,000 conservatives, Cawthorne said, “This is a very dangerous precedent that we must fight against.”
“Social media is a public forum for our generation. It should be subject to the same protections offered to all public forums.” “I am calling for the First Amendment protections to be applied to this new town square (referring to social media),” Cawthorne said in a post on his personal web page.
On Jan. 6, Cawthorne, now 25, challenged the electoral votes of the disputed states in a joint session of Congress. He said he believes the states “undermined the constitutionally mandated method of election” in this election.
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