GOP senator writing book criticizing Big Tech for ‘tyranny’

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), one of Congress’s biggest critics of Big Tech, is writing a book about the companies he has long criticized, his publisher announced Friday. 

In Hawley’s book titled, “The Tyranny of Big Tech,” the senator will argue that Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple represent the “gravest threat to American liberty since the monopolies of the Gilded age,” according to Simon and Schuster’s description. 

“At a time when these platforms are determining elections, banning inconvenient political views, lining politicians’ pockets with hundreds of millions of dollars, and addicting our kids to screens, I want to draw attention to the robber barons of the modern era,” Hawley said in a statement to The Associated Press. “This is the fight to recover America’s populist democracy. That is why I am writing this book.”

The book is scheduled to be released in June. 

The announcement comes just a day after Hawley amplified his allegations of an anti-conservative bias on social media in the wake of Facebook and Twitter deciding to limit the spread of a New York Post story about Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden that was criticized over its sourcing. 

Twitter said that the article violated its hacked materials policy. 

Hawley sent letters this week inviting the CEOs of Facebook and Twitter to testify before the Senate regarding their actions taken on the Post story. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) later said the Senate Judiciary Committee would be voting next week to subpoena Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey regarding actions taken on the matter. 

Hawley, who is viewed as a potential 2024 presidential candidate, on Friday urged the committee to also subpoena Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. 

Both Zuckerberg and Dorsey are slated to appear before the Senate Commerce Committee later this month as part of a previously scheduled hearing.  

Twitter, which had blocked users from tweeting links to the Post story, on Thursday night changed its policy on hacked material.

The company said posts with hacked materials will only be immediately locked if they’re directly posted by the hackers or by individuals working with them, and labels with context will be added to tweets containing hacked materials. 

Dorsey tweeted that the original link blocking the Posts’ story was a mistake. 

“Straight blocking of URLs was wrong, and we updated our policy and enforcement to fix,” he wrote. “Our goal is to attempt to add context, and now we have capabilities to do that.”