California Republican Congressman Devin Nunes railed against tech giants Apple, Google and Amazon for banning Parler from their app stores, complaining Sunday that he and all other conservatives are being cut off from each other on social media.
Nunes demanded federal authorities immediately investigate those companies for their "coordinated attack" on the right-wing Parler app. The GOP congressman and ardent Trump supporter touted his own 3 million Parler followers before complaining that he's losing the ability to connect with them on the "very safe" social media platform. Nunes said Facebook and Twitter's move to place indefinite account bans on President Donald Trump ensures that Republicans will no longer have any way to communicate in the near future.
The Countdown to Socialism author and frequent critic of "mainstream media" censorship addressed his concerns on the Fox News Channel, by far the country's most-watched cable news station on television.
Devin Nunes says Republicans have no way to communicate now pic.twitter.com/3XBIwSUcLl
— Acyn Torabi (@Acyn) January 10, 2021
"The effect of this is there is no longer a free and open social media company or site for any American to get on any longer. Because these big companies—Apple, Amazon, Google—they have just destroyed what was likely a billion dollar company, and, poof, it's gone," Nunes told Sunday Morning Futures host Maria Bartiromo.
"But it's more than the just the financial aspect of that. Republicans have no way to communicate. It doesn't even matter if you're Republican or conservative, if you don't want to be regulated by left-wingers that are at Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, where you get shadow-banned and nobody gets to see you and they get to decide what's violent or not violent, it's preposterous," he continued.
Nunes demanded the Department of Justice and the FBI open investigations into the private companies. The Big Tech companies have reiterated that their terms of service were repeatedly broken by Trump and Parler and their choice to remove those bad actors from their own platforms is clearly within the parameters of freedom of speech.
But Nunes claimed there was "clearly a violation of antitrust, civil rights, and the RICO statute," a reference to the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations law, which was famously used by federal prosecutors to break up American organized crime syndicates beginning in the 1980s.
He warned conservatives they are not safe on Twitter, Facebook or any other platform run by "left-wingers."
"If you break crimes on Facebook or Twitter, good luck trying to find out who they are...There should be a racketeering investigation on all the people who coordinated this attack on not only a company, but on all of those like us, like you and me Maria [Bartiromo]—I have 3 million followers on Parler. Tonight, I will no longer be able to communicate with those people."
Last week, Nunes was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Donald Trump for his work in defending him against Russian collusion allegations. In the last congressional session, the California Republican was the ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
Newsweek reached out to Nunes' office for additional remarks Sunday afternoon.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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Benjamin Fearnow is a reporter based out of Newsweek's New York City offices. He was previously at CBS and Mediaite ... Read more
