Vivek Ramaswamy, a candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, told Newsmax on Monday his experience with LinkedIn, the social media networking platform that briefly suspended his account, gave him some ideas about how to stop further censorship by Big Tech companies.
Ramaswamy told "Rob Schmitt Tonight" the problem was Republicans "conferred special crony privileges onto these companies for a very long time" that the companies concluded Republicans wouldn't go after them because they love big business and they could "get married to the Left," a group that used to be a threat to Big Tech.
"What's the right answer?" said Ramaswamy, whose account was suspended by LinkedIn because it said it violated the company's rule on misinformation. Once Ramaswamy made the suspension public, the company backpedaled and said it was suspended because of a "mistake" and it was reinstated.
"I believe that we need to roll back many of those crony privileges. Take Section 230-C-2 that protects tech companies like LinkedIn," he said.
The section of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 that Ramaswamy refers to states no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of:
- Any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether such material is constitutionally protected.
- Any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in [the previous] paragraph.
Ramaswamy said there are some state laws that prohibit LinkedIn from doing what it did to him, but those are superseded by the federal statutes.
"My view is we need to convert that into an opt-in statute," he said. "If you want the protections of the federal government, fine, then you're bound by the same constraints as the federal government. That means the First Amendment to the Constitution."
"I understand these things deeply. I think we have to stay objective. We've got to stay clear-headed [because] logic is on our side. That's why I'm running for the presidency not based on vengeance and grievance but based on, first, principles and moral authority. That's how we're going to go even further to actually get it done."
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