Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) signed legislation on Monday that reins back large tech giants while also supporting consumers who feel they have been wrongly discriminated against.
At a ceremony in Miami, DeSantis signed the measure, which he described as the first of its kind in the United States. His office sent the following statement in response to the bill:
Both Floridians who have been handled poorly by Big Tech platforms will be able to sue businesses who break this legislation and receive punitive damages. This reform protects every Floridian’s interests by forcing social networking sites to be clear regarding their content management processes and provide consumers with adequate notification of revisions to such policies, preventing Big Tech bureaucrats from “changing the goalposts” to censor opposing viewpoints.
Under Florida’s Unfair and Deceptive Trade Practices Act, the Attorney General can file a lawsuit against technology firms who breach this statute. If social media sites are found to have broken antitrust laws, they will be barred from doing business with any government agency. The “antitrust violator” blacklist has real implications for the bottom lines of Big Tech oligopolies.
Big Tech is not allowed to deplatform Floridian election candidates. The Florida Election Commission will charge any social media firm that de-platforms any nominee for statewide office $250,000 a day, and $25,000 a day for de-platforming candidates for non-statewide offices. Any Floridian will block any candidate they do not wish to hear from, and this is a privilege that any resident has — it is not up to Big Tech giants to judge.
In his remarks at the ceremony, DeSantis said that the dominance exercised by Silicon Valley tech giants has exceeded that of the early twentieth-century monopolies that sparked U.S. antitrust rules, and that the tech companies have become a modern “public square.” He chastised tech behemoths like Twitter and Facebook for “suppressing thoughts that are either inconvenient to the narrative or in which they individually disagree.” In part, DeSantis stated:
When our nation was founded and the Constitution was written, the founding fathers were worried with challenges to liberty mainly arising from government authority, and they feared that concentrations of power would eventually lead to the curtailment of people’s liberties. So they created a constitution of division of authority, checks and balances, and that was intended to establish a democracy that could do the stuff that a government wanted to do, but did so in a manner that was as safe as possible and had as many different checks and balances along the way so that power could not accumulate in one section of the government. And I think they were very wise in doing so, because we’ve seen what happens in other communities when such safeguards aren’t in place, and the consequences are unavoidably catastrophic.
But now we find ourselves in a circumstance that the founding fathers might not have predicted. Whereas the First Amendment was established to protect people’s freedom of speech, religion, and association from government overreach, we now have a situation in which some of these massive, massive companies in Silicon Valley are exerting a power over our population that has no precedent in American history, and I would suggest monopolies now, these big tech monopolies are exerting way more power than monopolies in the past. So we’ve arrived at a point where these outlets have become our public square.
Floridians and other Americans use these sites to exchange ideas. Heck, if you look back to the inception of these networks, they were also very empowering because you had corporate media, the news sources, which many Americans came to hate, and rightly so. They no longer had the intelligence monopoly. You could potentially bypass the legacy media to exchange facts on these channels, which was very beneficial to millions and millions of Americans. Actually, it was a bit too constructive, which irritated the powers that be, and so I believe what we’ve seen in recent years is a turn away from internet outlets, social media platforms, from being liberating agents to now being enforcers of orthodoxy. As a result, it seems that their main task, or one of their primary missions, is to eradicate concepts that are either inconvenient to the narrative or in which they personally disagree.
