WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — Leading U.S. House Speaker candidate Jim Jordan is weak on Big Tech and has stopped significant reforms to its power, a conservative leader warned recently.
The next vote for Speaker of the House is scheduled for Tuesday, though Jordan does not necessarily have enough votes lined up to win. Previous nominee Steve Scalise of Louisiana had to drop out after he failed to win enough votes. Jordan has the backing of President Donald Trump.
Terry Schilling, president of American Principles Project, said he agrees with Jordan “about 90% of the time,” but “the 10% that he’s wrong isn’t just a deal breaker for me — it’s a deal breaker for free and fair elections in America.”
Schilling laid out his concerns in a thread on X on Oct. 10. Since that time, the Ohio congressman has emerged as the frontrunner for the speaker role.
“[Jordan] has actively subverted our ability to pass legislation to stop Big Tech from rigging our elections for Democrats. He stopped Section 230 reform. He blocked antitrust. And he’s offered no solutions of his own,” Schilling wrote.
LifeSiteNews did not receive a response to a Monday morning email sent to Russell Dye, Jordan’s communications director on the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, which the congressman chairs. LifeSiteNews asked for comment on Schilling’s allegations and what Jordan planned to do to rein in Big Tech if elected speaker.
Even efforts that seemed on their face to address Big Tech concerns were for show, Schilling alleged.
He wrote in two subsequent posts on X:
A few years back, Jordan was constantly going on TV to talk about getting Section 230 reform done. He oversaw a task force, told us everyone would get behind it. Nothing happened. Once Elon bought Twitter, Jordan abandoned any pretense of reform — issue solved!
Jordan will tell you he introduced a Section 230 reform bill — this is true, but it was almost certainly written by Big Tech lobbyists. The bill had no enforcement mechanism and would have completely failed to prevent censorship of conservatives.
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act has been used by platforms to justify removing conservative content. The Department of Justice (DOJ) under President Trump attempted to rein in Section 230 to stop conservative censorship while ensuring platforms could still remove pornographic and illegal material, but the proposal went nowhere.
The failure to reign in Big Tech power set up Republicans for election losses in 2020 and in the future, Schilling wrote. He noted the suppression of stories on Hunter Biden’s laptop by platforms including Facebook and X, at the time Twitter, and how that likely influenced the election.
We need to be honest. @Jim_Jordan has actively subverted our ability to pass legislation to stop Big Tech from rigging our elections for Democrats. He stopped Section 230 reform. He blocked antitrust. And he’s offered no solutions of his own. 2/
— Terry Schilling 🇺🇸 (@Schilling1776) October 10, 2023
“That story was so deadly to Biden. His son used his father’s official office to enrich their family while smoking crack with hookers,” Schilling wrote. “In normal America, that story might have shifted not just 50k votes, but millions of votes. Big Tech stopped it, and that made the difference.”
“Republican voters were understandably furious,” Schilling alleged. “But when it came time to check Big Tech’s power and influence over our elections, Jordan wasn’t just AWOL — he was actively fighting against it.”
The Heritage Foundation called Jordan’s 2021 legislation on Section 230 a “measured tool.”
“This measured, careful proposal accounts for the technical realities of content moderation and identifies the issue of scale between tech companies of various size and reach,” an analyst for the conservative think-tank stated.