Twitter Slapped as FCC Chief Takes a Swipe at Silicon Valley

(Bloomberg) -- Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai, responding to criticism from Silicon Valley of his proposed rollback of open-internet regulations, criticized Twitter Inc. and other companies, calling them a greater threat to web freedom than the broadband providers the rules were designed to restrict.

“When it comes to an open internet, Twitter is part of the problem” because it discriminates against some messages or messengers, Pai said in his speech in Washington on Tuesday defending his proposal to gut Obama-era net neutrality rules.

The remarks show big tech is increasingly out of favor in a Washington transformed with the election of President Donald Trump, and his appointment of officials such as Pai, a Republican. Web companies that were riding high, with employees shuttling in and out of the federal government during the years of the Barack Obama presidency are now fending off angry lawmakers and critical regulators.

“There's a quiet sense that, far from helping things, social media is making it worse,” Pai said in another speech Wednesday before the Media Institute, a Washington policy group. “This unprecedented medium for collaboration and connecting people feels like it's dividing us and driving us apart.”

Alphabet Inc.'s Google, Facebook Inc. and other web companies have fought what they called an assault on internet freedom contained in a bill aimed at thwarting sex trafficking of children. And Facebook, Google and Twitter were grilled by angry senators after they acknowledged extensive efforts by Russians to spread disinformation during the 2016 elections.

“We are seeing the pressure turned up on the tech companies that often serve as the new town squares for our public discourse,” Representative Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican, said at a hearing by a House panel on Wednesday. “We need to examine how and why content is being blocked, filtered, or prioritized.”

Blackburn's running for a Senate seat in Tennessee, and she earlier said Twitter had blocked her from paying to promote a campaign announcement that included an anti-abortion message. “Silicon Valley elites are trying to impose their values on us,” Blackburn said in a post on her campaign website. “The liberal elite wants to censor us at every opportunity.”

Pai in his speech criticized what he calls “edge providers” -- a term the FCC has used to encompass Google, Facebook, YouTube, Netflix Inc. and Microsoft Corp.'s LinkedIn -- as “a much bigger actual threat to an open internet than broadband providers, especially when it comes to discrimination on the basis of viewpoint.”

Read More: AT&T, Comcast Win as Trump's FCC Urges End of Obama Web Rule

Pai cited Blackburn's campaign ad, and also said the service had warned users that a link to a statement by one company on the topic of internet regulation “may be unsafe.”

“The company appears to have a double standard when it comes to suspending or de-verifying conservative users' accounts as opposed to those of liberal users,” Pai said in a speech sponsored by the policy groups R Street Institute, based in Washington, and San Francisco-based Lincoln Network. “This conduct is many things, but it isn't fighting for an open internet.”

San Francisco-based Twitter said it temporarily blocked the ad in question from widest distribution because “a small portion of the video used potentially inflammatory language.”

The company didn't respond directly to Pai.

“Chairman Pai's attack on Twitter is like a boxer losing a fight and taking wild and erratic swings,” said Chip Pickering, chief executive officer of the Incompas trade group that counts Twitter as a member.

“Preventing hate speech and bullying behavior online is not the same thing as allowing cable companies to block, throttle and extort money from consumers and the websites they love,” Pickering said in an emailed message. “Twitter is an amazing platform for left, right and center. Donald Trump might not be president without it, and Chairman Pai's plan to kill net neutrality will put Comcast and AT&T in charge of his Twitter account."

Broadband providers including AT&T Inc., Comcast Corp. and Verizon Communications Inc. would be free to block or slow websites under Pai's policy, set for a Dec. 14 vote at the FCC where he leads a Republican majority that's backed his plan.

Web companies have criticized the proposal, with Twitter saying “we strongly oppose the weakening of net neutrality protections and will continue to fight for an open internet.”

In a July blog post, Lauren Culbertson, a public policy manager for the website, said the FCC's net neutrality rulemaking would “gut the core entrepreneurial and consumer protections that are the heart of the innovation economy” and said “the FCC should abandon its misguided effort.”

The FCC chair also used his speech to push back against celebrities including Cher, Mark Ruffalo and Alyssa Milano, who have all criticized aspects of Pai's plan. “This debate needs, our culture needs, a more informed discussion about public policy,” Pai said. “We need quality information, not hysteria, because hysteria takes us to unpleasant, if not dangerous places.”

Pai critic Harold Feld, senior vice president with the policy group Public Knowledge that supports the Obama-era rules, ascribed Pai's broadside partly to “longstanding animus toward Silicon Valley” and partly to a desire by the FCC chairman to discredit a web-based campaign against the proposed changes.

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To contact the reporters on this story: Todd Shields in Washington at tshields3@bloomberg.net, Selina Wang in New York at swang533@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jon Morgan at jmorgan97@bloomberg.net, Elizabeth Wasserman

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