RINO McCain Joins Dems, Sponsors Bill to Regulate Facebook, Breitbart, Drudge
Has John McCain ever found a big-government encroachment he didn’t love? First, the alleged conservative from Arizona voted to keep Obamacare propped up after repeatedly pledging to repeal it.
Now, the elderly senator is pushing for bureaucrats to regulate yet another area: The internet.
McCain has attached his name to the so-called “Honest Ads Act,” a bill that has been drafted in response to the still unproven claim that Russia influenced the 2016 election.
Under the proposed law, “big websites like Facebook, Drudge Report, Breitbart News, Google and the New York Times would face substantial punishment if they don’t make ‘reasonable efforts’ to block foreigners from posting political ads,” explained Washington Examiner.
Co-sponsored by two Democrats, the bill’s new requirements and penalties would kick in for any U.S.-based site with other 50 million unique monthly visitors and $500 in political ad revenue.
One of the big problems with the bill is its vagueness. The way it is currently worded, websites would have to make “reasonable efforts” that political advertising is not purchased “directly or indirectly” by a foreign national.
What does “indirectly” actually cover? Nobody seems to know.
“We don’t know what that means, but we would not be surprised to see groups opposed to free speech claim that such ads can’t be purchased by any publicly traded company as such companies have many, but an unknown number, of foreign owners,” explained David Keating of the Center for Competitive Politics.
Investigating “indirect” connections to any foreign national isn’t the only new burden the bill would place on website owners. It would also require sites to track and save every ad message, the target audience, and detailed information about the sponsors. All of that adds up to more work and overhead for online publications.
Knee-jerk reactions are rarely the foundation of wise laws. Despite constant media attention, the number of online ads with alleged Russian connections was so small that it went unnoticed by Facebook for months, and almost certainly made zero difference in the election.
“By the bill sponsors’ own accounts, less than 1/100 of 1 percent of the online political spending last year was by Russians, but the bill would impose new regulatory burdens on the other 99.99 percent of American speakers,” electronics lawyer Eric Wang pointed out.
Ironically, creating ever larger bureaucracies to probe and police online publications is a step toward a government that looks a little more Soviet, and a lot less free.
“Though purporting to regulate Russia, in fact this regulates Americans,” explained the Center for Competitive Politics.
“By imposing more broad burdens on Americans’ speech rights rather than targeting foreign interests interfering with our elections, their bill would make America look a little bit more like Russia.”
It’s easy to see big online media outlets like Facebook as the enemy, and conservatives have certainly had their frustrations with social media companies in the past.
However, laws affect everyone, including right-leaning outlets. More government regulation of the internet — whether it’s Facebook or your favorite conservative news site — is not the right answer. In a time of ever-growing bureaucracy, the web has been a bastion of laissez faire liberty.
Social media is the new printing press, and we should be very wary of letting big-government apologists like McCain and his new Democrat allies “fix” what is not actually broken.