There is no doubt that former President Donald Trump was the social media president. Millions of people followed his every tweet. Many of those tweets were critical of Silicon Valley companies that were hostile to him and conservatives as a whole.

Liberal social media companies and most of their left-wing employees didn't like Trump. When Facebook chose not to take action over Trump tweets connected to racial protests and rioting in the spring of 2020, many employees were furious. They staged a “virtual walkout” of work to pressure the company to take an editorial stand against the former president.

The Trump resistance was even stronger at Google, Reddit, Twitter and other companies. According to a Project Veritas investigation, Google’s Responsible Innovation Head Jen Gennai criticized the desire to break up Google, saying that would not help “prevent the next Trump situation.” After saying everyone got “screwed” in 2016, she added “We’re also training our algorithms, like, if 2016 happened again, would we have, would the outcome be different?”

Google and YouTube also yanked hundreds of Trump campaign ads in 2019, according to a CBS investigation. The companies did not say which policies the ads violated.

Twitter began fact-checking and hiding Trump tweets under content and policy violation warnings months ahead of the 2020 election. This past election cycle Big Tech founders and employees were boosting Trump’s opponents. Employees donated far more to President Joe Biden’s campaign than to Trump’s reelection.

Biden also had high profile tech billionaires, including Reid Hoffman, who helped propel him into the White House.

The hostility was mutual. Throughout his presidency, Trump criticized tech companies for helping Democrats, “silencing millions” by suppressing conservative voices, for working against him, for monopolistic practices and for relationships with countries like China.

When four prominent social media and tech companies came to another congressional hearing in July 2020, Trump threatened to act himself if Congress failed to.

“If Congress doesn’t bring fairness to Big Tech, which they should have done years ago, I will do it myself with Executive Orders. In Washington, it has been ALL TALK and NO ACTION for years, and the people of our Country are sick and tired of it!” Trump tweeted.

After the election, most major social media platforms banned Trump in January. He could no longer use Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and the other platforms he used to reach the American people. Big Tech silenced the then-sitting president of the United States.

Trump began taking action in 2020 by issuing an executive order on Section 230 and by banning U.S. business with two Chinese tech companies. While still in office, Trump's administration also investigated potential antitrust violations by multiple companies. The former president also expressed willingness to work with Democrats to regulate the tech industry.

• Sources told Reuters in September 2020, that Trump’s Department of Justice would sue Google over monopolistic advertising practices sometime within weeks.
• Trump issued executive orders banning U.S. business with Chinese companies Bytedance and Tencent, the respective owners of TikTok and WeChat, because of their relationships with the communist Chinese government.
• In July 2020, The Commerce Department (under Trump’s prior executive order) petitioned the FCC to “clarify the scope” of Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. Trump wants to prevent political censorship of content by companies like Twitter, Facebook and others.
• After Twitter began fact-checking Trump and other politicians’ tweets, the former president issued an executive order saying that if a social media company is going to editorialize by telling people what is true or false, it needs to be stripped of the liability protections provided by Section 230. The order also announced that within 60 days the Secretary of Commerce would file a rulemaking petition to the FCC to have Section 230 language adjusted. It prompted a federal lawsuit on First Amendment grounds from an organization that receives donations from Big Tech.
• Trump tweeted on May 16, that his administration is “working to remedy this illegal situation” of the “radical left’s” control of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Google.
• He considered establishing a federal panel to review complaints of anti-conservative bias by social media platforms.
• The Trump administration has been investigating potential antitrust violations by several major tech companies.
• The former president accused Google, Facebook and Twitter of trying to help Democrats get elected in 2020. He also suggested suing them over antitrust issues.
• The White House held a Social Media Summit in July 2019 to discuss the problem of political bias by Big Tech and censorship of conservatives. At the summit, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) talked about his Ending Support for Internet Censorship Act. Trump called it “very important legislation.”
• The Trump administration created a way for people to say they’ve been censored by social media companies in May 2019. In just a few weeks, more than 16,000 complaints were submitted. The Tech Bias Story Sharing Tool was later discontinued.
• Reporters asked Trump during a November 2018 press briefing if he would work with Democrats to regulate social media companies. He replied, “I would — I would do that. I would look at that very seriously. I think it’s a serious problem. At the same time, you start getting into speech; that’s a very dangerous problem. That could be the beginning. So it’s very dangerous.”
• Trump and his team were “taking a look” at regulating Google because of biased search results in 2018. Google denied manipulating its results.
• Amazon and its owner Jeff Bezos were favorite targets of Trump, because Bezos also owns the liberal Washington Post. Bezos sued the Trump administration for government contracts, claiming unfair treatment. 

Since so much of Big Tech joined the resistance against former President Donald Trump, it was predictable that so many industry players worked to help his Democratic opponent succeed.

President Joe Biden has deep-pocketed Silicon Valley support. Vox Recode reported that LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman (now a Microsoft board member), Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt all had “ambitious” and sometimes “secret” plans to propel Biden into the White House. Hoffman alone was expected to spend $100 million trying to unseat Trump.

Recode reported that Hoffman and Schmidt were pouring millions into reviving the Democratic Party’s digital infrastructure. Hoffman also worked to help left-wing digital media groups posing as journalists defeat Trump’s “brand machine.” Schmidt created OneOne Ventures to invest in political startups teaching the left how to use the data once collected. Meanwhile, Moscovitz concentrated his efforts on Democratic voter turnout.

After Biden became the presumptive Democratic nominee, the partisan divide of tech sector donations grew, according to CNBC. Biden received 12 times as much from them as Trump in spite of his criticism of Silicon Valley companies.

According to Vox, Biden’s pick of California Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate was also sure to please the tech community. Harris is particularly close to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg who heralded the choice on Instagram.

Like many liberals, Biden has been concerned Big Tech companies don’t do enough to censor Trump. Rather than defend free speech online, Biden demanded Facebook fact-check political ads just before the 2020 election. (Facebook’s fact-checking has proven to be inaccurate and biased against the right). Facebook resisted and said it would protect political free speech. The company eventually reversed course and joined most major social media platforms in banning Trump in January 2021.

Biden also suggested determining if Facebook should be broken up through antitrust laws, and he called for Section 230 to be revoked. He said that he wanted social media companies to be “more socially conscious” and act with “journalistic responsibility.”

His campaign also had close ties to Big Tech, according to The New York Times. One of his closest aides came from Apple, and the Innovation Policy Committee that advised Biden included several employees from Big Tech, including: Facebook, Amazon, Google and Apple. Some of them hoped to persuade Biden not to heavily regulate the sector.

• Biden’s campaign spent thousands on Facebook ads accusing the platform of being a “threat” to democracy. His ads urged people to join his petition against Facebook to take down inaccurate statements — mostly Trump’s.
• Security issues surrounding Chinese-owned TikTok prompted the Biden campaign to order staff to remove the app from their personal and work phones.
• Biden, then the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, wrote an open letter to Facebook in June calling on it to fact-check political ads in the two weeks leading up to the 2020 election.
• Biden raised $4 million from 25 donors at a single, Silicon Valley fundraiser in June 2020.
• "We should take a really hard look at” antitrust laws and the possibility of breaking up Facebook, said Biden in May 2020.
• In January 2020, Biden called for Section 230 to be immediately revoked from Facebook and other companies. This was just after Facebook refused to take down an ad about his son Hunter and Ukraine. Section 230 is the part of the Communications Decency Act that shields tech from liability over content published on their platforms. Biden argued Facebook is “not merely an internet company. It is propagating falsehoods they know to be false.” 
• Axios predicted a Biden presidency would be “stabler” for Big Tech than a second-term of Trump and that the Democrat would not race to regulate tech early in the presidency. It conceded Biden might not rein in other Democrats who want much more regulation of the industry. However, Democratic Rep. David Cicilline of Rhode Island challenged that assertion on Yahoo’s “The Long Game” podcast saying, “There’s no reason to not expect a new administration to take this up in their first year.” Cicilline has led the House antitrust investigations of technology companies.
• Biden expressed willingness to regulate all online platforms to force them to “be more socially conscious” during a 2019 CNN town hall.
• Restoring net neutrality regulations was one of many policy items in a “Unity Task Force” document forged by Biden and former presidential competitor Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).
• Biden wanted Amazon to “start paying their taxes.” In order to force them, he proposed a federal minimum tax of 15 percent of profits targeting companies like Amazon.
• He’s an advocate for privacy standards “not unlike the Europeans” and proposed to pay for a $20 billion investment in broadband access by taxing the wealthiest Americans.
• Before joining the 2020 presidential race, Biden sought advice from Twitter and other digital and social media companies to learn how to appeal to young voters. 

The very same liberals who criticize capitalism and view entire industries as bad allowed the liberal tech and social media companies to flourish because they viewed them positively. Democrat Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco was one of those liberals. She has been a great friend to Silicon Valley behemoths. After all, they were on the same side.

The companies took the same left-wing stances on LGBTQ rights, immigration, guns and abortion as Pelosi. Being such kindred spirits, the companies were extremely generous to her over the years.

Not only that, but Open Secrets listed Microsoft, Facebook and Alphabet among her top 20 contributors in the 2019-2020 election cycle. NPR reported in 2019 that Microsoft and Alphabet (owner of Google and YouTube) both gave Pelosi “six-figure sums” during her congressional career, which began in 1987. During those years, Facebook donated more than $76,000 and Amazon more than $30,000.

She only recently started making overtures about regulating or stripping Big Tech of Section 230 immunity. In 2017 and 2018, the tech companies’ support for Trump’s tax cuts upset Pelosi. Within months, she told Vox’s Recode Decode podcast, an era of tech self-regulation “probably should be” over.

“I think we have to subject it all to scrutiny and cost-benefits and all that, but I do think that it’s a new era,” she added.

In 2019, Facebook chose not to take down a video of Pelosi that was slowed down, making her appear drunk. Although it eventually tagged the video as “false,” it did not remove it. She said Facebook’s inaction changed her mind about its culpability with regard to election meddling. The video or a similar one surfaced in 2020.

“When something like Facebook says, ‘I know this is false — it’s a lie — but we’re showing it anyway,’ well to me it says two things,” Pelosi said. “I was giving them the benefit of the doubt on Russia ... I thought it was unwittingly, but clearly they wittingly were accomplices and enablers of false information to go across Facebook.”

• Pelosi threatened to hold social media company executives accountable for COVID misinformation in June 2020.
• “Yes, we like Twitter to put up their fact check of the president, but it seems to be very selective,” Pelosi said in May 2020. She slammed Twitter for not doing enough to fact-check President Donald Trump calling it “outrageous.” 
• Pelosi encouraged advertisers to “know your power” and pressure social media to censor “disinformation.” 
• She criticized Trump’s executive order to weaken Section 230 protections. “The president’s executive order, far from addressing the problem, actually directs the federal government to dismantle platforms’ efforts to help users distinguish fact from fiction, truth from lies,” she complained.
• Pelosi took aim at Facebook in January 2020 saying: “[T]hey don't care about truth, they don't care about where this is all coming from, and they have said, even if they know it's not true, they will print it," said Pelosi. "I think they have been very abusive of the great opportunity that technology has given them." Reporters said she appeared to be criticizing the company’s political ads policy.
• Pelosi worked to remove the liability shield (Section 230) from the United States-Mexico-Canada trade agreement. “There are concerns in the House about enshrining the increasingly controversial … liability shield in our trade agreements, particularly at a time when Congress is considering whether changes need to be made in U.S. law,” a Pelosi spokesman told the Wall Street Journal.
• Pelosi supported the House Democrats’ antitrust probe of Facebook, Google and other tech companies in June 2019. Investigation leader Rep. David N. Cicilline (D-RI) told NPR she had been informed ahead of time and was very “supportive of it.”
• “[Section] 230 is a gift to them ... and I don’t think they are treating it with the respect that they should,” Pelosi told Recode Decode on April 12, 2019. “For the privilege of 230, there has to be a bigger sense of responsibility on it, and it is not out of the question that that could be removed.”
• Pelosi is a huge supporter of “net neutrality” legislation. In 2017, she introduced legislation with New York Democrat Sen. Chuck Schumer to restore the regulations.
• “I think the tech community is a tremendous advantage to San Francisco, it always has been to the Bay area. And that job creation, innovation and all of that is good for the community as long as it doesn’t change the character of the community,” Pelosi told a Bloomberg reporter in 2015.
• Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt was slated to speak at a Pelosi event in Napa Valley where she brought some of her biggest “supporters” and several vulnerable Democratic candidates together to schmooze in 2014.
• Bloomberg reported in 2010 that Pelosi was a big winner when it came to receiving Silicon Valley donations. The report cited her policy efforts including support for research and development tax credits, which made many venture capital and technology companies happy. The reporter said it appeared to be “a mutual admiration society” not a “quid pro quo” situation.
• In 2008, Google invited Pelosi to speak at one of its “Policy Talks at Google.” Before introducing her, Google’s Alan Davidson called her a “real champion of the tech community.” She thanked the company’s employees for empowering people and “strengthening democracy” through its work.

Contact Speaker Pelosi: (202) 225-4965, (415) 556-4862, email, Facebook, Twitter or by mail to 1236 Longworth H.O.B. Washington, DC 20515

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) is a Republican some have called a right-wing “populist” because of some of his legislative ideas. Despite being elected in 2018, he’s already become one of Big Tech’s biggest critics in Washington, D.C.

He introduced multiple bills to corral companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter and Amazon. He worked to ban TikTok from government-owned devices, called for a criminal antitrust investigation of Amazon as well as suggesting similar investigations of monopolies like Google and Facebook. He’s also criticized social media companies over privacy concerns, bias and selective censorship of conservatives.

Hawley’s March 2020 bill to ban the Chinese-owned Tik Tok app from government equipment unanimously passed the Senate on Aug. 6, 2020. He also introduced a bill in June of that year to limit immunity tech companies currently have under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

"For too long, Big Tech companies like Twitter, Google and Facebook have used their power to silence political speech from conservatives without any recourse for users. Section 230 has been stretched and rewritten by courts to give these companies outlandish power over speech without accountability,” Hawley said in a press release. “Congress should act to ensure bad actors are not given a free pass to censor and silence their opponents."

Republican Sens. Marco Rubio (FL), Mike Braun (IN), Tom Cotton (AR), and Kelly Loeffler (GA), cosponsored the bill which would open tech companies up to lawsuits and damages if they “selectively” censor political speech.

Before becoming a freshman senator by defeating incumbent Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) in 2018, Hawley was Missouri’s attorney general for two years. He said that in that role he launched the first antitrust and privacy investigation into Big Tech. A litigator and constitutional attorney, Hawley helped win two cases before the Supreme Court including Hobby Lobby v. Burwell.

• Hawley’s bill to ban TikTok from U.S. government devices passed the Senate unanimously in August 2020.
• Hawley wrote Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey in May, demanding to know why it should retain Section 230 immunity after “editorializing” political speech by adding fact-checks to President Donald Trump’s tweets. “Twitter decided to editorialize, appending its own comments and assessment to the President’s speech. But editorializing is what publishers do.”
• Faced with the possibility of Microsoft buying TikTok from ByteDance, Hawley warned Microsoft that any deal that did not sever ties with the Chinese Communist Party or its proxies would be “unacceptable.”
• The senator slammed Google for acting like a publisher when it threatened a prominent conservative website (The Federalist) with demonetization over comments left on its website by outsiders. 
• Hawley’s BAD ADS bill took aim at Big Tech’s data tracking practices and use of behavioral advertising.
• Concerned with the Federal Trade Commission’s inability or unwillingness to hold giant, technology companies accountable, Hawley proposed major changes to the agency. His bill would move the FTC to within the Department of Justice, restructure its leadership and give it more power. 
• Wired interviewed Hawley in 2019 and said he sounded like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). Warren has called for breaking up Big Tech companies. Hawley replied, “Well, I think everybody who cares about workers, everybody who cares about working families, everybody who cares about competition and innovation needs to be concerned about big tech.”
• He and three other senators blasted Facebook for downgrading Live Action’s reach over “false” information after biased fact-checkers unfairly flagged pro-life content. The senators wrote, “No reasonable person would describe Grossman or Schickler as neutral or objective when it comes to the issue of abortion, yet Facebook relied on their rating to suppress and censor a pro-life organization with more than 3 million followers. These are clear violations of the IFCN principle and of Facebook’s supposed commitment to non-partisanship.”
• In July 2019, he introduced legislation to combat social media addiction. That same month, Hawley condemned YouTube’s unwillingness to turn off automatic video recommendations of minors when it came to pedophiles during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.
• Hawley introduced the “Ending Support for Internet Censorship Act” in June 2019. The bill was read and referred to committee, but has gone no further. It would have required companies content moderation policies to be “politically unbiased.” The bill drew criticism from regulation-averse conservatives and libertarians for being vague and having potential to increase censorship. Trump praised the bill. 
• Hawley called for a third-party audit of Twitter’s suspension policies after it suspended the account for the pro-life film Unplanned, during its opening weekend.

Contact Sen. Hawley: (202) 224-6154, through his website, Facebook, Twitter, or by mail to 212 Russell Senate Office Building Washington DC 20510

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) is a leading Republican critic of Big Tech censorship and she chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Tech Task Force. She has also experienced the industry’s suppression personally. 

Twitter objected to one of her pro-life political ads. Instagram also blocked advertising multiple times for a children’s book she co-wrote celebrating women’s suffrage. In 2017, when the congresswoman announced her Senate bid, she released a campaign ad highlighting her values and accomplishments. In it, Blackburn referenced her pro-life record saying, “I fought Planned Parenthood and we stopped the sale of baby body parts.” Twitter flagged the ad as “inflammatory” and “negative” and blocked her campaign from running the ad unless it removed the objectionable statement. Twitter later relented.

“I’m being censored for telling the truth,” Blackburn wrote in an email to supporters. “Twitter has shut down my announcement video advertising. Silicon Valley elites are trying to impose their values on us.” 

As a member of the Senate, Blackburn has been involved in legislation to amend Section 230 and urged former Attorney General William Barr of the Department of Justice to scrutinize Google’s “anticompetitive practices.” “I also ask that your probe examine abuses in both the online advertising and online search markets, and to take enforcement action swiftly before further economic harm results,” Blackburn wrote to Barr. 

She also urged the Federal Trade Commission to interview former Facebook employees as it investigates the company.

• Blackburn and two other Republicans introduced legislation in September 2020 to alter vague language in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Fast Company reported: “The bill, called the Online Freedom and Viewpoint Diversity Act, would narrow the kind of user content tech companies can remove from their platforms, and restrict their ability to make ‘editorial’ choices about what content to host and where it appears.”
• Instagram twice blocked Blackburn’s daughter from advertising the apolitical, children’s book about women’s suffrage she and her mother wrote together.
• Speaking of social media platforms, Blackburn has said: "They suggestively manipulate their algorithms ... You look at what's happening on YouTube, and it's the wild west. You can put up anything, say anything, and it's there, except when it comes to conservatives. Conservative filmmakers, conservative entertainers, people in Christian music have had their movie trailers, their videos, their songs removed from some of these platforms."
• Blackburn told Bloomberg the U.S. needs a basic federal data privacy standard because “the internet does not know where the state line begins and ends.” In the same interview, she said she was “pleased” TikTok raised the minimum age for in-app purchases after she criticized it for letting anyone over 13 make purchases.
• She testified before the House Judiciary Committee in April 2018 that tech companies are censoring conservatives and recounted her own censorship experiences.

Contact Sen. Blackburn: By email or by phone.