Big Tech

Today U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) introduced the No TikTok on United States Devices Act to prohibit the Chinese-based TikTok app from being downloaded on U.S. devices and ban commercial activity with TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance.  “TikTok poses a threat to all Americans who have the app on their devices. It opens the door for the Chinese Communist Party to access Americans’ personal information, keystrokes, and location through aggressive data...

Today U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) announced he would introduce new legislation to ban TikTok in the United States.  Senator Hawley’s No TikTok on Government Devices Act was signed into law last year.  He originally introduced the legislation in 2020 and it unanimously passed the Senate later that year. In April 2021, Senator Hawley reintroduced the legislation and it unanimously passed in the Senate Homeland Security...

Today U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) released the following statements on the latest update to the Twitter Files, revealing extensive collusion between the FBI and Twitter to suppress reporting on Hunter Biden and interfere in multiple presidential elections.

Today U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) sent a letter to Apple's Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook urging him to reduce Apple's dependency on foreign labor in China and reshore production to the United States. Senator Hawley also called on Apple to explain why they limited the iPhone AirDrop feature in China, widely used by anti-CCP protestors, and respond to reports that they have threatened to remove Twitter from the App Store. Read the full...

Today in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) questioned Peiter "Mudge" Zatko, Twitter whistleblower and former head of security for Twitter, who revealed that over 4,000 Twitter engineers have access to user data, including geolocation data, that could be used to dox users.  Mr. Zatko also revealed that Twitter engineers have the ability to “tweet as anybody” and may have done so.  "That is a significant concern, 4,000 people with the ability to dox...

Today U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission calling for an investigation into Amazon’s planned acquisition of 1Life Healthcare, a medical company that oversees an extensive network of primary care providers. If allowed to go forward, this transaction will give Amazon access to a healthcare practice operating more than 180 medical offices throughout the United States. “This particular...

The ACCESS Act will require the largest social media companies to make data portable and services interoperable  U.S. Senators Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Mark Warner (D-Va.), and a group of bipartisan colleagues recently reintroduced the Augmenting Compatibility and Competition by Enabling Service Switching (ACCESS) Act.This bipartisan legislation encourages market-based competition to dominant social media platforms by requiring that the largest companies make user data portable...

Today U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) sent a letter to Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas expressing deep concern about the agency's new Disinformation Governance Board and demanding it be dissolved. Senator Hawley cited as a particular concern DHS’s appointment of Nina Jankowicz, an anti-free speech activist with a long history of partisan attacks, to lead the board. "I confess, I at first thought this announcement was satire. Surely no American Administration...

Today U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) sent a letter to Twitter's new owner, Elon Musk, calling for a comprehensive public audit of Twitter's past censorship practices. Senator Hawley writes, "In recent years, Twitter has intervened in American discourse with an increasingly heavy hand, attempting to shape the information environment for overtly partisan reasons. Algorithms didn’t make those calls; employees did. And at this point, the American people deserve to know the...

Today U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) sent a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, demanding explanations for a recent academic study finding filtering that Gmail's spam filtering algorithm was significantly more likely to mark Republican fundraising emails as spam than Democrat fundraising emails. The letter comes amid ongoing debates over free speech around the sale of tech giant Twitter and censorship issues that have persisted in the tech industry for years. In his letter to...