Marsha Blackburn: “over the past few months, we have all watched the power that the digital community has to make someone's passing thought…”

“over the past few months, we have all watched the power that the digital community has to make someone's passing thought go viral and the power that the digital mob has to make controversial voices completely disappear. Well, who is the ``digital mob'' exactly, because right now we are hearing a lot about mob rule. Sometimes it is hard to tell who the mob actually is. Is it the millions of users who swarm social media platforms at the very first hint of a controversy, or is it the professional activists who provoke many of these attacks? They seem to know just when to pitch a thought, a word, or an idea. Could it be the platforms themselves that cave to the pressure and police speech when they don't agree with that speech? So let's drill down on this just a little bit. Today I want to focus on the Googles and the Facebooks of the world because, when it comes down to it, they are the ones that are in the driver's seat. They are the ones that end up calling the shots. For years, tech companies have waged a very public war against platform users who speak out against the popular narrative, and the executives charged with defending these calls routinely struggle to explain the arbitrary nature of their content-moderation policies. Every time moderators remove a post for what is called shocking content or cause a moral panic by placing a warning label on satire, Big Tech asks us to just, oh, write it off: It was a mistake. We really didn't mean to do it. Move on.…”