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US: Sens. Hawley, Cruz seek FTC investigation into social media

By  |  July 15, 2019

A pair of Republican senators have called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate “tech censorship practices,” reported Bloomberg.

Senators Josh Hawley (Montana) and Ted Cruz (Texas) sent a letter to all five commissioners (the majority are Republicans) to ask them to study how tech companies curate content “due to the enormous influence” they have over speech and what they called the “alarming and endless possibilities for abuse.”

“Big tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter exercise enormous influence on speech,” the two Republican senators wrote in the letter, which Hawley’s office provided. “They control the ads we see, the news we read, and the information we digest. And they actively censor some content and amplify other content based on algorithms and intentional decisions that are completely nontransparent.”

The request comes as Republicans increasingly allege that the companies engage in systematic anti-conservative bias, an unsupported claim. But the possibilities for abuse “are alarming and endless,” including potentially swaying elections, the senators claim.

Full Content: Bloomberg

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