Trump could call down Congress, law on social media

With President Trump's economic adviser Larry Kudlow confirming just this week that the  commander-in-chief was reviewing the idea of regulating those social-media monopolies, the question immediate arose just what can he do.

After all, they are private companies and do pretty much as they please.

But according to an article in the Washington Post, there are a lot of open doors for a dedicated president.

For example, the report said, "By calling on Congress to hold more hearings to rein in Google and other tech companies, Trump could shape the upcoming legislative agenda. In this case, many Republicans are already on the same page as Trump. During a grueling hearing in April, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tex., accused [Facebook chief Mark] Zuckerberg of a 'pervasive pattern of bias.'"

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And the report noted months ago already Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., proposed a bill to impose privacy obligations on Silicon Valley.

And she's the leading Republican on a key subcommittee dealing with tech.

Then, the report said, there's the option of law enforcement.

"Trump could encourage the Justice Department or the Federal Trade Commission to open an investigation into Google," the Post report said.

"He would not need to do so explicitly in order for regulators to get the message, said Luther Lowe, senior vice president of public policy at Yelp, a company that has been critical of Google's search practices. Trump's rhetoric alone could give them political air cover to launch a probe," the report said.

"They [would] have free rein to pursue cases on the merits without fear of facing political headwinds," said Lowe.

And then there also are "outside-the-box" approaches available to a president who's done almost nothing inside-the-box since being elected.

For example, he could encourage third parties to sue Google, the report said.

"Presidential administrations have been known to file arguments as a non-involved party in outside lawsuits, according to Matthew Dickinson, a political scientist and presidential scholar at Middlebury College in Vermont. 'It's not unusual for the government to weigh in on court cases in areas like, say, affirmative action, involving suits by private citizens.'"

USA Today reported that Kudlow's affirmation of a review of possible regulations got an endorsement Wednesday from Kevin Hassett, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers.

In an interview with Fox, he said, "Well, first, there are independent agencies that look into this all the time. And it's our job at the White House, really, to be looking at the 21st century economy, not the 20th century economy, right? Like, so we can't be just really good at buggy whips, we've got to think about what's going on right now."

Kudlow had spoken up after Trump made social media accusations that Google's search engine is "rigged" against him.

There have been multiple cases documented in recent weeks of social media giants, including Facebook and Google, canceling out the speech of conservatives online.

At the same time, Google claimed in a statement its search engine does not "use a political agenda."

When Trump tweeted that such practices "will be addressed," he didn't reveal his plans right away.

Kudlow's confirmation came just after studies confirmed the pervasive anti-Trump, anti-conservative bias online and explained how its carried out.

WND recently reported a 49-page memo spelled out a plan by George Soros-funded groups in January 2017 to collaborate with social-media platforms to remove Trump from office.

Joseph Farah, CEO and founder of WND, called the memo "nothing short of a plan to turn Google, Facebook and other social media into hyper-partisan Democratic Party activists, promoters, cheerleaders, and off-the-books donors in an effort to turn the country into a one-party state."

He pointed out the plan was instituted right after President Trump's inauguration, which was when independent, online media outlets such as WND and Breitbart began to see their traffic curbed by Facebook, Google and others.

Long before any other news organization, WND was exposing the coordinated campaign by the “Internet Cartel” – Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Amazon, Apple and others – to silence free speech by censoring and suppressing independent, conservative and Christian expression on the Internet. Here are highlights of WND’s groundbreaking news and analysis of what has been called the 21st century's greatest assault on America’s fundamental freedoms of speech, press and religion.

The Los Angeles Times reported Kudlow's comment Tuesday "puts the search giant squarely in the White House's crosshairs amid wider allegations against the tech industry that it systematically discriminates against conservatives on social media and other platforms."

Talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh cited the "active suppression of conservatism and conservatives on all of these platforms."

"There is not an engagement of ideas. There is an elimination of ideas," he said.

Limbaugh said there isn't "this vibrant so-called beautiful, wonderful smorgasbord of ideas where people get to exchange and debate and expand their minds."

"There is an ongoing effort to eliminate anything that is not from the liberal order, which would mean eliminating conservatives, conservatism, conservative sites, conservative results and search engines. I know it's not news to you that this has been going on," he said.

"It is a massive effort being undertaken that has as its purpose the elimination of conservatism by simply pretending it doesn't exist."

Newsbusters has published a report by its umbrella, the Media Research Center, explaining how online media companies suppress conservative speech.

"War is being declared on the conservative movement in this [online] space and conservatives are losing — badly. If the right is silenced, billions of people will be cut off from conservative ideas and conservative media," Newsbusters said. "It's the new battleground of media bias. But it's worse. That bias is not a war of ideas. It's a war against ideas. It's a clear effort to censor the conservative worldview from the public conversation."

The Media Research Center found the problem at Twitter, Facebook, Google and YouTube is "far more troubling than most conservatives realize."

For example, "Project Veritas recently had caught Twitter staffers admitting on hidden camera that they had been censoring conservatives through a technique known as shadow banning, where users think their content is getting seen widely, but it's not.

And Facebook's "Trending Feed" was found by Gizmodo to be exhibiting bias.

"It had detailed claims by former employees that Facebook's news curators had been instructed to hide conservative content from the 'trending' section, which supposedly only features news users find compelling."

Blacklisted were the Conservative Political Action Conference and Rand Paul.

And at Google?

"Google and YouTube's corporate chairman Eric Schmidt had assisted Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. The company's search engine had deployed a similar bias in favor of Democrats. One study had found 2016 campaign searches were biased in favor of Hillary Clinton. Even the liberal website Slate had revealed the search engine's results had favored both Clinton and Democratic candidates. Google also had fired engineer James Damore for criticizing the company's 'Ideological Echo Chamber.' The company had claimed he had been fired for 'advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace.' Damore is suing Google, saying it mistreats whites, males and conservatives."

The study uncovering the anti-Trump bias was by PJMedia, which found that in a search on Trump not "a single right-leaning site appeared on the first page of search results."

The researcher performed the search "multiple times using different computers (registered to different users) and Google returned similar results."

"While not scientific, the results suggest a pattern of bias against right-leaning content."