Sen. Lindsey Graham told Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner that a licensing requirement should be developed for social media companies to prevent abuse of young girls and empower parents and consumers.
The topic came up on Mondays “The Faulkner Focus” segment of Fox News while Faulkner and Graham discussed Twitter’s regulation of posts that point toward a laboratory leak as the actual cause of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“This Twitter stuff, Google, this is as big a story as how COVID started. ‘Cause what they did is suppress the other side of the story,” Graham began. “Every time a scientist would come forward to suggest maybe it came out of a lab or that we’re not following the science, that we’re overdoing it, that we’re going too far, they were shut down. So the real story for me is that the social media companies that exist today, Google, Twitter — they’re unregulated and you can’t sue them. They are the largest companies in the history of the world and a consumer has no recourse. We need to fix that.”
Faulkner asked if Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act would be helpful to accomplishing this, to which Graham replied yes.
“Will Republicans finally do something with that and do you think you can get it through in the Senate?” Faulkner continued.
Here Graham compared social media to other television and broadcast media regulations.
“Okay. Suing Twitter, if somebody says something bad about me and they use Twitter, I can sue Twitter if it’s a lie. Suppressing information about my campaign, not putting my ads in the dumpster, I can bring lawsuits,” he said. “But the more important thing to me is the regulatory commission. You have to have a license to sell real estate, to open up a TV station, to run a radio station. These companies should have a license that can be taken away.”
Faulkner remarked that a call for censorship goes against the broader Republican attitude toward government and regulation, and asked Graham about this exception.
“Here’s the deal: To get a license you have to have privacy protection. A license requirement would be that if you take my content down I can appeal your decision as a social media company to somebody outside the company because I’m a consumer,” Graham said. “Young girls are being driven to websites just to make money. There’s a mental health abuse here by these algorithms. The social media companies are doing a lot of damage to young teenage girls. And we need a licensing requirement to prevent that and to empower parents.”
After Faulkner commented on his passion for the subject, Graham responded with the words, “Yeah. I mean, this is the biggest issue facing America.”
Watch a clip from the segment in the video above.
