Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis called for the breakup of technology giants like Google during a videotaped conference in 2021, ProPublica reported Tuesday.
On the video captured during an invitation-only Teneo Network conference in 2021, DeSantis speaks with businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, a Republican presidential candidate for 2024, about Big Tech companies, including Google, saying they should be dismantled due to their oversized influence in American political discourse.
"Protecting the rights of folks to participate in political speech, I think, is an absolutely appropriate role for government," DeSantis, a Republican, said in the video published by ProPublica. "I do think that companies like Google should be broken up. They are just too big and have too much power."
DeSantis said the companies are "exercising a more negative influence on our society" than the huge trust companies broken up in the early 20th century.
DeSantis said in the 2021 video that tech companies are working with the government on censoring individuals and are "an arm of the ruling regime," and used more frequently against conservatives.
"If you have a conservative viewpoint, you're much more likely to get censored, you're much more likely to get deplatformed," he said.
DeSantis said that while former President Donald Trump was not a part of the collaborations, the federal bureaucracy was giving the companies their agendas to fulfill.
"It's [the bureaucracy's] bidding [the companies] are doing," DeSantis said. "These tech companies are ruining our country. They're a very negative influence. You need to be strong about it. And so that would not be the biggest concern I would have. My concern would be not having massive concentrations of power that are capable of silencing dissent, enforcing an orthodoxy and obviously interfering in elections, which we saw they did in 2020."
While ProPublica tried to dispel the notion that the companies unevenly targeted the right by citing a 2021 New York University study that determined there was no "evidence" to support the claim, recent revelations through the Twitter Files document a systemic approach to do just that.
CBS News reported that the internal documents and emails at Twitter revealed by journalists Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and Bari Weiss showed the practice taking place during the COVID-19 pandemic and 2020 elections.
"Slowly, over time, Twitter staff and executives began to find more and more uses for these tools," Taibbi reported Dec. 2. "Outsiders began petitioning the company to manipulate speech as well: first a little, then more often, then constantly."
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