Regulating successful companies would defy the conservative principles those regulations would be designed to protect, said Carl Szabo, general counsel of NetChoice, an industry group with members that include Amazon, Facebook, Google, TikTok and Twitter.
“I’m an originalist, and that’s kind of why I feel so strongly about some of the things that we do see online that do raise concerns for me, as a conservative, when I see people being removed, people being, quote-unquote, deplatformed or blackballed or whatever we want to call it today,” he said. “But the other side of me, the originalist, conservative side, says, but that flies in the face of the notion that private businesses can be the arbiters of what is best for their users and their advertisers.”
Szabo pushed back against the idea that platforms are targeting conservative speech, arguing that left-wing content creators complain that their speech is censored as well.