After having released information months ago proving that online service providers had become a “secret tool” for stifling conservatives on the internet, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) introduced legislation designed to protect against politically motivated censorship by tech companies utilizing discriminatory terms of service policies.
Cruz also detailed in an April report how companies like Eventbrite refuse service to conservatives because of their political views. He contends that the influential tech companies should explain to Americans exactly how they are using their terms of service as weapons to prohibit conservatives from utilizing products.
“As my Committee investigation revealed, Big Tech is increasingly weaponizing their broadly-worded terms of service agreements to silence and deny conservatives access to essential business technology,” Cruz said on Thursday. “The free flow of information through freedom of speech is the bedrock of our democratic republic, which is why online service providers should, at the very least, be required to be transparent about their political discrimination.”
Cruz’s bill, the Transparency in Enforcement, Restricting, and Monitoring of Services, or TERMS Act, would require terms of service be publicly disclosed. Companies would also have to give users 30 days’ written notice before it closed an account due to violations of the terms of service.
One portion of the bill says companies need to reveal “the specific act or practice of the user that led to the decision to restrict the user.”
Cruz’s legislative move is even more significant coming on the heels of his outing Eventbrite for barring groups from using its platform to organize events around the movie premiere of “What Is A Woman?” and others.
“Eventbrite said that its decision to cancel the ‘What is a Woman?’ event was based in a large part on their objection to the film itself,” Cruz said. “But then they couldn’t identify anything with the film that violated its terms of service.”
“They canceled the event without watching the movie,” Cruz explained, calling it “brazen abuse of power” that’s carried out in “an explicitly ideological leftist way to silence conservative voices while not silencing those voices on the left.”
In April, Matt Walsh commended Cruz’s probe for “confirming all of my suspicions” about what led to Eventbrite de-platforming the film without notice.
Walsh added, “Conservatives have long suspected they’re being deplatformed for fraudulent, politically motivated reasons. This congressional investigation confirms it.”