The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees free speech to all private citizens. But as conservatives have had to learn the hard way, our First Amendment protections are not safe in the era of Big Tech.
Recently, we’ve witnessed unprecedented efforts on the part of Big Tech monopolies to coordinate the censorship of conservative political views. Just recently, Amazon Web Services, Google, and Apple conspired to boot the conservative-friendly social media app Parler off the web. And every day, more stories emerge of conservatives and Christians who find their social media accounts suspended, banned or otherwise censored for voicing their views.
If these trends continue, it won’t matter that we have the First Amendment at all; conservatives and Christians will still find it impossible to voice their opinions online and in the media. We need a change, and we need to hold Big Tech accountable.
America was founded to be a safe haven for free speech and religious liberty. Many, if not most, of the original colonists were fleeing religious and political persecution at home. In response, the Founding Fathers built our country from the ground up to protect people from persecution for expressing different viewpoints or practicing their religion peaceably.
Today, Americans still enjoy greater freedoms than almost any other country in the world, and our Constitution protects every citizen from censorship by state actors. But those same constitutional protections don’t safeguard speech from Big Tech.
For years now, Big Tech companies have grown ever more left-leaning. While these companies have a legal right to decide what speech is published on their platforms, they’re increasingly abusing that right to advance a partisan political agenda. Mainstream media sites, alongside many leftist politicians, treat censorship by Big Tech as an essential instrument in the fight to protect American democracy. In reality, Big Tech censorship means silencing, distorting, and suppressing ordinary American viewpoints for no other reason than political gain.
I have firsthand experience of how misguided and inappropriate Big Tech censorship can be. For months, my daughter had her own Pinterest account. She used that account to create informative pins with inspiring Bible verses, and even utilized Pinterest to organize an online Bible study. But Pinterest banned her, on the specious grounds that her posts contained “violent language.”
I can personally attest that all my daughter posted was Biblical language. It frankly doesn’t matter whether Pinterest has the legal right to moderate content on its own platform; this kind of one-sided and politically charged censorship of straightforwardly Christian views should be intolerable to all of us in America. When just a handful of companies can decide what views count as appropriate or inappropriate in the public sphere, we’re no longer living up to the vision our founders had for this country.
Luckily, a few politicians are taking action to protect free speech. Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida has put forward new laws to prevent unbridled tech censorship, and there is a bill in Texas that would give citizens a legal right to petition for declaratory relief if their online accounts are unfairly suspended.
We need more politicians to step up to the task and tackle censorship head-on. And we need conservatives and Christians across the country to advocate for their right to speak their minds, discuss their views and share their faith.
Political tensions are high in America today. We can’t afford to let private tech monopolies conspire to make politically motivated decisions about what is or is not allowable speech. There may not be an easy fix for the situation we’re in. But the time is now to fight for a better, smarter framework for moderating speech. Inaction or silence might cost us our freedom.
Timothy Head is executive director of the Faith and Freedom Coalition.
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