Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has proposed a digital bill of rights that would enshrine various privacy protections for Floridians, according to the governor’s office.
If enacted, among other protections, Floridians would have the right to private, in-person conversations without surveillance and will be able to participate on online platforms without unfair Big Tech censorship.
They‘ll also have the right to know how internet search engines manipulate search results and how to control their personal data, and they’ll have the right to protect children from online harm.
His proposal has already gained the support of state Attorney General Ashley Moody.
“My office and I have said for years that we think Big Tech needs a reboot. And so we’re here today to say we’re going to give them that reboot,” she said on Feb. 15.
“A little tech support, Florida-style.”
The legislation includes an extension of the governor’s previous barring of the video-sharing platform TikTok on state government devices to those of local governments, as well as a ban on it from public schools and colleges.
It would extend that ban to other electronic media associated with the Chinese Communist Party and will restrict data collection on children without their parents’ consent, allow people to delete or edit their children’s data, and prohibit data collection from online programs in schools.
The measure will prohibit the government from partnering with social media to censor information. DeSantis mentioned the FBI working with Twitter and former White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci working with Facebook toward that end.
Debate Issues, Don’t Censor Views
“They’re just laying out the facts on this, and Google and YouTube pulled the video down because they were saying that kids should go to school mask-free,” DeSantis said in a speech at Florida Atlantic University in West Palm Beach on Feb. 15.“This is a core debate.”
DeSantis noted that time had proved the roundtable experts right on schools opening and children not having to wear masks.
“Why would you censor that information? You should want to be debating these issues. These are very significant issues that affect a lot of people’s, not only quality of life, but their development as young people,” he said.
The proposal builds on legislation that the state enacted in 2021.
DeSantis repeatedly singled out Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Google for a host of what he called abuses.
Twitter’s censorship practices have been publicly documented since Elon Musk acquired the social media company and opened up its files to journalists.
Should the proposed digital bill of rights be enacted, Google and other search engines operating in Florida will have to disclose whether they prioritize search results based on political or ideological views.
DeSantis said that social media companies have received federal protection from libel liability under the theory that they’re not publishers but forums open to everyone. Enjoying that protection and then censoring people constitutes fraud, he said.
“They do have terms and conditions. They have certain rules. But those rules are applied with a thumb on the scale against the people they disagree with politically,” he said.
“So you’ve seen people who have conservative views marginalized entirely, banned, de-platformed, shadow-banned. All these different things have happened.
“So what we would try to do is just say, look, in the state of Florida, we have consumer protection, unfair trade practices laws.
“If you’re advertising as being an open platform, you’re taking that liability that says you’re not a publisher. You’re monetizing by taking people’s data who join your services. And then if you turn around and de-platform someone based on viewpoint, you’re committing a fraud.”
DeSantis decried the loss of privacy that has come with pervasive digital media.
“You go buy a phone. You turn it on. You put it in your car. You don’t even make a call. Don’t even open the web. The browser is just sitting there next to you. You drive around, run errands, do all that stuff,” he said.
“It is collecting all the data about what you’re doing. They know when you’re driving. They know when you get out of the car, all these different things. And it’s nuts to think the amount of information they can compile on you.
“All these people tell me, they’re having a phone conversation, and they mentioned, like, red roses, and then like the next thing they know they’re getting an ad sent to them for red roses.”
Speaking at the same conference, Seth Dillon, CEO of The Babylon Bee, a conservative satire website, spoke of how his promising business, launched in 2016, quickly attracted millions of viewers.
“Our outlook was hopeful. It seemed like satire had a bright future. But what happened next is no joke. In an effort to crack down on the spread of ’misinformation,' Facebook started working with third-party fact-checkers,” Dillon said.
“In 2018, we published a headline that read, ‘CNN purchases industrial-sized washing machine to spin news before publication.’
“Snopes rated that story false. Shortly thereafter, we got a message from Facebook saying that if we continue publishing misinformation, our page will be demonetized and removed from the platform.
“As Facebook began throttling our speech and threatening to de-platform, we started seeing issues on other platforms. Our jokes were getting flagged for hate speech and incitement to violence. Our email service cut us off for spreading ‘harmful misinformation.’”
The Babylon Bee spent eight months in “Twitter jail,” Dillon said, for a headline referring to Biden’s transgender secretary of health that read, “The Babylon Bee’s Man of the Year is Rachel Levine.”
The publication was told they would be unblocked if they deleted the joke.
“We refused,” Dillon said, noting that the incident went beyond censorship.
“Instead of taking down our joke, they required us to delete it and admit that we engaged in hateful conduct. That’s not censorship. That’s subjugation.
“I’ve long held that when you censor yourself, you’re doing the tyrant’s work for him. We never even considered it.”
Twitter’s “lip service commitment to free speech”—prominently mentioned in its policy and mission statement—makes this even more outrageous, he said.
The Washington Post reported that on Musk’s first day as Twitter CEO, “he issued an urgent directive: ‘Bring back The Babylon Bee,’” Dillon said.
He tied what happened to the satire site, being told what it can’t even joke about, to the canceling and threats comedians have faced all over the country.
“The comedian’s job is to poke holes in the popular narrative, whatever that narrative may be,” he said.
“I’m thankful to have leadership here in Florida that recognizes this and is willing to take action to ensure we all have the right to speak, and, yes, even make jokes in the public square.”
Shannon Chapman, a mother of two in Palm Beach County, spoke of how one of her sons, while watching a TikTok video on his iPad when he was 8, had it roll over automatically to a video that graphically showed a child being sexually abused.
Her son had nightmares for weeks and asked his parents why people would hurt children. He ultimately needed to see a psychologist, Chapman said.
“Someone has to step in and say, enough is enough. Stop targeting our children. We know TikTok is mining our children’s data like location keystrokes on behalf of the Chinese government. It is not an innocent video app.”
