At a Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing on “Book Bans: Examining How Censorship Limits Liberty and Literature” on Sept. 12, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) questioned Emily Knox, a library and information sciences associate professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the chair of the National Coalition Against Censorship’s board, about government censorship of free speech. Mr. Hawley accused the Biden administration of collusion with Big Tech to censor Americans’ speech on social media.
The committee’s chairman, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., during the hearing said, “Book banning has reached new heights over the past two years,” Durbin said. “Local leaders in states such as Texas, Florida, Utah, Missouri, Iowa, Indiana and others have all recently enacted legislation facilitating banning books in local school districts and libraries.”
Republicans bashed Democrats for holding the hearing in the first place, accusing them of trying to intimidate parents trying to speak out for their child. Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, said it’s big tech that needs to be looked at. “You’ve got the government doing exactly what Professor Knox said is not permitted under the First Amendment directly coercing the speech of private parties, and not just one or two authors, but parents all across the country. Unprecedented in the history of this nation. So I’m glad we’re having this hearing today. I hope that we will have more likely to expose the censorship happening at the highest levels of our government,” he said. “I hope that we will have more like it to expose the censorship happening at our highest levels of government.”
He referred to a Louisiana federal judge recently restricting some branches of the Biden administration from communicating or meeting with certain social media platforms about content moderation. The ruling came in response to a lawsuit brought by GOP attorneys general alleging that government officials, under the guise of curbing misinformation, colluded with social media platforms to remove conservative voices and viewpoints, including posts about the COVID and Hunter Biden’s laptop.
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Hawley on Senate “Book Bans” hearing: Biden Admin coercing parents all across the country