FCC Commissioner Carr writes to Big Tech, accuses them of forming “censorship cartel”

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has written to the chief executive officers at Apple, Microsoft, Google parent Alphabet and social media conglomerate Meta, accusing them of “playing significant roles” in an “unprecedented surge” of censorship of US citizens’ digital opinions and voices.

In a letter on November 13 addressed to Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook, FCC commissioner Brendan Carr said that the big tech companies “silenced Americans for doing nothing more than exercising their First Amendment rights”.

“They targeted core political, religious and scientific speech. And they worked—often in concert with so-called ‘media monitors’ and others—to defund, demonetise, and otherwise put out of business news outlets and organisations that dared to deviate from an approved narrative,” Carr said in his letter.

Accusing these companies of working together with other advertising, marketing and fact-check firms, Carr said that the big tech companies had formed a “censorship cartel”, which is an affront to the digital rights of the US citizens and therefore must be “completely dismantled”.

In his letter, Carr said that since NewsGuard, one of the fact-checking companies with which all the four big tech companies have worked, is the subject of an ongoing investigation by the US House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, all four companies should provide a list of the products and services which use or rely on any NewsGuard product.

Further, these companies must also provide details of the use of media monitors and fact-checking services and the details of any third-party advertising or marketing agencies that they use, Carr said.