Today, NetChoice announced opposition to the PRO-SPEECH Act—a bill sponsored by Sen. Wicker (R-MS) designed to remove social media and e-commerce sites’ ability to moderate user posts and make other important content decisions.
“The PRO-SPEECH Act may look like it checks some boxes for conservatives, but in practice it will make the internet impossible to use by forcing all of us to sift through the worst of the internet just to connect with our friends and family,” said Carl Szabo, Vice President and General Counsel at NetChoice. “It’s clear that the bill’s advocates have not thought through its wide array of harmful consequences like the simultaneous proliferation of hate speech, sexism, racism, and other types of awful but lawful content and destruction of safe for kids options like safe search.”
“By banning family-friendly tools like Safe Search, this bill will result in more spam, foreign disinformation, hate speech, pornography, and terrorist content online,” continued Szabo. “Rather than protecting Americans’ free speech rights, the PRO-SPEECH Act will transform the FTC into the internet speech police and social media into a weapon for foreign agents to spread dangerous misinformation.”