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Pennsylvania State Senate
05/15/2024 07:39 AM
Pennsylvania State Senate
https://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/Legis/CSM/showMemoPublic.cfm?chamber=S&SPick=20230&cosponId=38702
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Senate of Pennsylvania
Session of 2023 - 2024 Regular Session

MEMORANDUM

Posted: December 15, 2022 12:05 PM
From: Senator Doug Mastriano and Sen. Scott E. Hutchinson
To: All Senate members
Subject: Combatting Big Tech Censorship
 
In the near future, we plan to re-introduce legislation from last session (previously SB 604) that would further protect the political speech of Pennsylvanians from undue restriction and censorship on large social media platforms. 

Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter has revealed what many of us had already known. According to recently released internal documents, big tech executives coordinated weekly with the federal government to ban users and censor political speech which they deemed as “disinformation.”

The new documents also revealed that Twitter used blacklists and “visibility filters” to interfere with user searches or “shadow-ban” individuals and prevent their tweets from trending.

While the Federal government continues to debate modifying Section 230 (Communications Decency Act), a state law solution is the best solution to the on-going problem of social media censorship as our legislation would fall squarely within the “breach of contract” exemption of Section 230.

Our legislation will do the following:
  • Create a private right of action that allows citizens of this commonwealth to bring legal action against a large social media platform if the platform purposely deletes or censors the user's political speech and/or uses an algorithm to shadow ban. A censored user who sues would be able to seek statutory damages, attorneys’ fees, costs, and other forms of relief.
  • Require a large social media platform to inform a user in writing why the user's account has been banned or disabled within 30 days of the action and offer the user recourse to restore the user's account.
  • Require large social media platforms to publish and consistently apply standards for user censoring, shadow-banning, and de-platforming
Prior co-sponsors include Senators PITTMAN, SCAVELLO, STEFANO and J. WARD

Please join us a co-sponsor to preserve freedom of political speech in the digital public sphere regardless of whether we agree with that speech or not.