Google is once again in the crosshairs of Republicans in Congress because of alleged censorship, Bloomberg writes. The House Judiciary Committee has subpoenaed Google's parent company Alphabet and CEO Sundar Pichai for evidence of communication between the tech company and the Biden administration.
The subpoena specifically asks for documents covering communications between Alphabet and the executive branch, along with discussions Alphabet might have had internally or with third-parties about those communications. The Committee hopes to snowball the discovery that the Biden administration made requests to Meta to remove COVID-19 misinformation into a case for "new statutory limits on the executive branch’s ability to work with Big Tech to restrict the circulation of content and deplatform users," the subpoena says.
None of these concerns are particularly new. Pichai and other tech CEOs have been brought in front of Congress to explain things like content moderation, censorship and bias before. In the past, it's mostly seemed like a way for members of Congress to get sound bites, but the aggressive, retaliatory nature of the Trump administration might give these new demands more teeth. Helping to pay for Trump's inauguration and showing up for photos didn't get Google protection in the end, assuming it doesn't manage to wriggle out of the ongoing antitrust case against it.
Tech companies might be getting attention from Congress, but the idea that the current administration might want to make censorship demands doesn't appear to be a concern. President Trump has expressed interest in using the Take It Down Act, a bill designed to hold websites liable for hosting and not removing Non-Consensual Intimate Imagery (NCII), to eliminate any kind of speech he dislikes. The disastrous potential misuses of the law have been outlined by activists before, but the bill passed in the Senate and is now waiting to be taken up by the House.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/house-republicans-subpoena-google-over-alleged-censorship-212115140.html?src=rss https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/house-republicans-subpoena-google-over-alleged-censorship-212115140.html?src=rssChcete-li přidat komentář, přihlaste se
Ostatní příspěvky v této skupině
It was a swing and a miss for the first private attempt at an asteroid mission, but the company is still chalking it up as a win. California startup AstroForge launched a spacecraft dubbed Odin on
ChatGPT on macOS is about to become more useful for coding. With t
The Nintendo DS is one of the toughest consoles to emulate, for an obvious reason. It’s the two screens. This is even an issue with ports. Some developers avoid the problem by mushing everything to
It's Thursday, which means there are some more PC games that Amazon Prime members can claim for free. Amazon has also revealed the entire slate of freebies that subscribers can snag throughout Marc
If you own one of Victrola's high-end, Sonos-ready turntables
Nearly 50 years after they were first launched, Voyager 1 and 2 are still traveling around interstellar space — though they've faced some setbacks over the years. Now, NASA has announced that the t
