On Wednesday, Governor Ron DeSantis (R-FL) made an announcement that puts Big Tech and Big Government on notice in the state of Florida, declaring there’s “a collusion between government and the private sector to deprive you of your rights.”
DeSantis discussed his legislative plans to restrict tech-government collusion Feb. 15, when he held a press conference to discuss his proposed Digital Bill of Rights in West Palm Beach, Florida, according to WPBF News. The governor took aim at social media and internet search engine censorship.
Florida’s Voice shared a clip from DeSantis’s press conference explaining his new Digital Bill of Rights. DeSantis said the bill of rights would not allow, “either formally or informally, any agreement between state or local government agencies and social media platforms for the purpose of content moderation.”
He cited the Twitter Files, particularly the FBI’s Twitter censorship work, and former NIAID director Dr. Anthony Fauci’s work to censor on Facebook. “Again, that’s a collusion between government and the private sector to deprive you of your rights,” DeSantis insisted.
The governor continued, “For search engine transparency, we are going to require for those doing business in Florida, these major internet search engines need to publish the criteria they use to determine which search results to display and in what order, including whether and in what circumstances politics, partisanship, or ideology is taken into account.”
MRC Free Speech America did a series of exclusive studies on Google search and election interference. MRC researchers exposed Google for extreme bias in an Oct. 2022 study showing how Google favored Republican Senate candidates in key races leading up to the 2022 midterm elections. Google also buried the campaign websites of Big Tech critics ahead of the midterm elections.
DeSantis has also slammed woke environmental, social, and governance (ESG) standards. The governor tweeted a clip of himself Feb. 13 critiquing ESG with the comment, “ESG is a threat to the American economy and the individual freedoms that our country is built upon. It is dead on arrival in Florida.”
Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that government agencies uphold the First Amendment and Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on so-called hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us at the Media Research Center contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
