Chicago City Wire

U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) turned heads yesterday in a U.S. Senate hearing on the power of tech companies when she suggested U.S. citizens be censored when posting on social media platforms. 

“I would like to provide a personal commitment that your respective companies will proactively counter domestic disinformation that spreads the dangerous lies such as masks don’t work, while aggressively identifying and removing disinformation that is part of our adversaries' efforts to interfere in our election and undermine our democracy,” Duckworth told top social media executives during the hearing. “Do I have a commitment from each of you gentlemen?” 

One Twitter user pointed out that several other countries — like Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark — don’t require masks and their numbers are relatively low.

Sen. Tammy Duckworth with Mayor Lori Lightfoot | senate.gov

 Duckworth is the state’s junior senator having taken over the seat from Republican Mark Kirk in 2017.

"Facts save lives, and there's no both sides when one side has chosen to reject truth and embrace poisonous false information," Duckworth said at the hearing.

Duckworth said in the hearing that social media can’t be trusted to put patriotism first.

“Social media is so pervasive in the daily lives of Americans than traditional media outlets that they can be weaponized to manipulate the public and destabilize their institution,” Duckworth said.

The Wall Street Journal suggested in an editorial that during the hearing, some senators were able to show that politics were involved in Twitter’s censorship — pointing out that it took the social media giant two months to add warning labels to Chinese propaganda that had said the U.S. military brought COVID-19 to China.

The senators also made comments on Twitter’s tolerance of violent tweets by a religious leader in Iran, as well as its censorship of President Donald Trump’s account.