FCC To Investigate Alleged Faith-Based Discrimination at YouTube TV as It Ramps Up War on the ‘Censorship Cartel’

The Federal Communications Commission is looking into whether YouTube TV is actively discriminating against faith-based media as its chairman wages a war against what he calls the “censorship cartel.”The Trump-appointed chairman of the communications regulator, Brendan Carr, sent a letter to YouTube TV inquiring about its “refusal to carry faith-based programming.”“When Google first launched YouTube TV in 2017, you entered a media marketplace dominated by traditional cable and satellite TV providers,” Mr. Carr said. “Since that time, the playing field has shifted dramatically…What has remained constant, however, is the importance of independent programmers and the challenges they can face in reaching wider audiences.”Mr. Carr said he had received complaints “alleging that your company has a policy (secret or otherwise) that discriminates against faith-based programming.” Specifically, he noted that the Great American Media company wrote to the FCC about its exclusion from YouTube TV’s programming, despite it being described as the “second-fastest growing channel in cable television.” “While they are carried on a range of cable and streaming services, including Comcast, Cox, Hulu, FuboTV, and DirecTV streaming, YouTubeTV refuses to carry them,” the chairman wrote.He said the “allegations of faith-based discrimination come at a time when American public discourse has experienced an unprecedented surge in censorship.”“In too many cases, tech companies silenced individuals for doing nothing more than expressing themselves online and in the digital town square,” Mr. Carr wrote. “Therefore, I am writing to determine whether YouTube TV has a policy or practice that favors discrimination against faith-based channels.”A spokeswoman for YouTube TV told the Sun, “We welcome the opportunity to brief the FCC on YouTube TV’s subscription service and the strategic business decisions we make based on factors like user demand, operational cost and financial terms, and to reiterate that we do not have any policies that prohibit religious content.”The letter to YouTube TV is one of the latest actions in Mr. Carr’s offensive against what he calls the “censorship cartel.” From Elon Musk’s X loosening its content moderation policies and bringing back accounts that had been banned to Meta abandoning its fact-checking program in favor of a “Community Notes” system, several Big Tech companies have taken steps to eliminate programs and policies that conservatives have said were used to censor them. Even before he took over as chairman, Mr. Carr made it clear that he planned to use the FCC’s regulatory authority to investigate conservatives’ long-standing complaints that Big Tech companies were censoring their views through either public or “secret” policies. In November, he posted a letter on X that he sent to the heads of Facebook, Google, Apple, and Microsoft, which he said have “played central roles in the censorship cartel,” warning that their liability protection could be at risk if they work with a company conservatives have alleged routinely works to censor their content.Last month, Mr. Carr sent a letter to ten companies, ranging from websites such as Wikipedia to tech companies like Apple, about the European Union’s content moderation rules, known as the Digital Services Act, asking them how they plan to balance complying with the law in Europe without it affecting their policies in America.“It is not clear how U.S. businesses will navigate the path forward. The DSA may force U.S. companies to skew their content moderation policies to EU standards — a race to the bottom and away from free speech,” he said. One option he proposed for the tech companies’ American operations is “bifurcating your platforms into one consistent with EU law and a separate one for free speech.” However, he conceded that the idea may not be “technically or economically feasible.”“To help support your efforts to restore and preserve free speech on your platforms, I am requesting a briefing from each of your companies. I want to understand how you are planning on reconciling the DSA with America’s free speech tradition,” he said. While some industry groups and tech analysts have raised doubts about whether Mr. Carr actually can make changes to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — which provides tech companies with liability protections — to punish Big Tech for alleged censorship with Congressional action, supporters and critics alike say his letters and warnings are accomplishing their intended purpose: getting tech companies to align themselves closer to the Trump administration’s policies. Conservatives have cheered Mr. Carr’s actions at the head of the FCC. However, some free speech advocates say the commission is “inappropriately” using its regulatory power. The lead counsel for technology policy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, Ari Cohn, posted on X, “This is jawboning plain and simple, no less than the kind complained of by its champions (e.g., government demands that platforms remove certain content).”“Opposing government censorship should be a bipartisan issue. For those truly committed to this ideal, support for this kind of jawboning oversight should be a no-brainer; nothing that has happened in the past should be a reason to not try to prevent it moving forward,” he wrote. During a recent interview with the editor in chief of Semafor, Ben Smith, Mr. Carr defended his actions targeting Big Tech, saying that social media companies are “the greatest threat [to free speech] that we have seen over the last several years.”“The social media companies got more power over more speech than any institution in history,” he said. “What we saw them doing with that power was discriminating against viewpoints, and the government was involved.”He noted the Biden administration’s pressure on social media companies to take down certain content about the Covid pandemic and said the intention of his actions is to ensure there is “more speech, not less.”

FCC To Investigate Alleged Faith-Based Discrimination at YouTube TV as It Ramps Up War on the ‘Censorship Cartel’

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