Platform Liability Doesn’t – And Shouldn’t – Depend on Content Moderation Practices In April 2018, House Republicans held a hearing on the “ Filtering Practices of Social Media Platforms ” that focused on misguided claims that Internet platforms like Google, Twitter, and Facebook actively discriminate against conservative political viewpoints. Now, a year later, Senator Ted Cruz is poised to take the Senate down the same path: he’s leading a hearing this week on “ Stifling Free Speech: Technological Censorship and the Public Discourse .” While we certainly agree that online platforms have created content moderation systems that remove speech, we don’t see evidence of systemic political bias against conservatives. In fact, the voices that are silenced more often belong to already marginalized or less-powerful people . Given the lack of evidence of intentional partisan bias, it seems likely that this hearing is intended to serve a different purpose: to build a case f...