‘Biggest Bait And Switch In History’: Attorney General Barr Slams Tech Giants For How They Gained Power | Eastern North Carolina Now

Publisher's note: This informational nugget was sent to me by Ben Shapiro, who represents the Daily Wire, and since this is one of the most topical news events, it should be published on BCN.

The author of this post is Daily Wire News.

    Attorney General William Barr told "Verdict with Ted Cruz" this week that the way that the big tech companies obtained the overwhelming level of power that they have was through "the biggest bait and switch in history," arguing that they gained power by allowing diverse views on their platforms and once they became dominate in the market, they started censoring views they didn't like.

    "We have antitrust investigation of all the major Internet platforms or most of the major Internet platforms, and that's very much underway," Barr said on the show, which is co-hosted by Daily Wire podcast host Michael Knowles. "I expect to be making decisions in the next few weeks about actions on that. I think during the summer we'll see some developments. But this issue of censorship is very troubling because our country was based and the Framers, as you know, believed the thing that would ultimately keep us free and keep a majority from repressing the minority is a lot of diversity of voices out there - a robust marketplace."

    "But these behemoths have gotten vast, strong control over the expression of views and the public forum here in the United States. And they got there and I've said this is the biggest bait and switch in history," Barr continued. "They got there by saying, 'Hey, we're going to be open to all views, you know, come join us because then you can have your views.' So they built up this powerful network, very strong market power based on the representation that they were sort of open to all, as a sort of a bulletin board. But then when they got that market power, now they're censoring views just like the example you gave. And they're now censoring views. And so we're getting increasingly monolithic viewpoints being presented to the American people rather than the kind of robust debate."

    "So one thing we're doing there is we're saying that Rule 230, which is a rule that gave immunity to companies for taking down things and didn't, therefore, convert them into a publisher where they'd be responsible for everything that appears on their site, we want to modify that so that they have to have clear terms of service," Barr concluded on the subject. "They have to show that what they took down they had reasonable grounds for saying it violated their terms of service. And they have to give notice and process to people's whose content they take down. That's one of the things that we're proposing."