The removal of a popular film title from Netflix in India has raised concerns about how the top streaming service, not to mention other U.S. streamers, will handle going forward the delicate sensibilities of their fastest growing region, Asia-Pacific (aka "APAC").

In India, pressure from right-wing Hindu activists resulted in Netflix taking down Annapoorani: The Goddess of Food, a popular, ostensibly uplifting film about a young female chef overcoming caste prejudice.

And in Malaysia, ex-prime minister Najib Razak, currently jailed on corruption charges, is asking local prosecutors to put takedown pressure on Netflix get eighty-six Man on the Run, a documentary highlighting a corruption scandal that he was in the center of. 

Combing through Netflix's "environmental, social and governance" (ESG) reports from 2019-2022 finds that of the 21 films removed from the No. 1 streaming service, 11 of them originated from APAC. 

And on a percentage bases, APAC is the fastest growing of Netflix's four global operating regions, with a subscriber base expanding by more than 11% through the first three quarters of 2023, per the streaming company's Q3 shareholders letter. (Netflix reports Q4 numbers Tuesday.)

Annapoorani, a  movie about a daughter who defies her upper-caste religious father when she enters a cooking contest with a dish featuring meat, was taken . “My team and I never intended to hurt anyone’s sentiments and we understand the gravity of this issue … The intention behind ‘Annapoorani’ was to uplift and inspire, not to cause distress.” as to call the film “evil,” while threatening legal action.

According to the New York Times, activist Ramesh Solanki, a self-described “very proud Hindu Indian nationalist,” filed a police complaint claiming Annapoorani was “intentionally released to hurt Hindu sentiments.” He said it mocked Hinduism by “depicting our gods consuming non-vegetarian food.”

“We did not expect the removal of a censored film, previously showcased in theatres, from the OTT  platform,” said the film’s star Nayanthra in a post on X. “My team and I never intended to hurt anyone’s sentiments and we understand the gravity of this issue… The intention behind Annapoorani was to uplift and inspire, not to cause distress.”

Annapoorani ranked fourth among non-English films on Netflix's global weekly ranker during its debut week, Jan. 1-7, amassing 7.5 million viewing hours and 3.1 million viewers worldwide. 

Responding to the movie's removal, Netflix's only statement was, “The film has been removed at the licensor’s request.”

Even though the decision to pull the plug locally on Annapoorani doesn't appear to have come from Netflix, the film's removal from Netflix serves to highlight the tricky terrain American streaming services are navigating as they try to serve the world's fastest growing streaming market. 

In Malaysia, Razak's campaign ironically aided viewership for the Netflix documentary it was fighting to take down, with Man on the Run jumping briefly to become the second-most watched film in the country. An X user even went so far as to say Razak "gave free press to Man on the Run."

Singapore, which has made the most successful takedown demands of any country listed on Netflix’s annual ESG reports from 2019-2022, with eight, frequently removes content seen as glorifying drug use.

The Philippines also requested that Netflix remove two episodes of Australian spy series Pine Gap, for showing maps of the South China Sea that officials claim violated Philippine sovereignty.

However, countries like Indonesia and Vietnam are taking things a step further, demanding that streaming companies succumb to more government oversight on the front end. In Indonesia, which regularly censors LGBTQ content, the broadcasting commission is pushing parliament to give it censorship control over streaming companies.

And last year in Vietnam, legislators mandated that streaming services obtain licenses and establish legal entities in the country in order to continue operating there.

But Netflix hasn’t always rolled over to censorship demands. In 2020, the platform resisted a Brazilian judge’s order to remove a satirical film depicting Jesus as a gay man by appealing to the country’s supreme court.

Former President Donald Trump has issued a manifesto against online content moderation, pledging if he is re-elected to try and eliminate efforts to weed out misinformation and disinformation, and support allowing adults (over 18) to opt out of any content moderation of social media platforms whatsoever.

That came in a six-minute video Trump emailed to supporters Friday (December 23).

Trump called it a “plan to shatter the left-wing censorship regime,” which he said was composed of “a sinister group of deep state bureaucrats, Silicon Valley tyrants, left-wing activists and depraved corporate news media” that he said had been conspiring “to manipulate and silence the American people.”

Trump appeared to have been fired up by Elon Musk’s release of Twitter documents related to the company's efforts to weed out misinformation and disinformation, which Trump alluded to as “bombshell reports.”

Also: Donald Trump Threatens More Lawsuits Against Media

He called those trying to prevent online disinformation a cartel that had collaborated to suppress vital information on “everything from elections to public health,” a cartel he said had to be “destroyed.”

Trump said that if he is re-elected he would issue executive orders banning any government effort to work with online platforms “to impede lawful speech.” He said no federal money would be used to help label speech as misinformation or disinformation.

Trump was banned from Twitter for spreading false information about widespread election corruption.

He said he launched a hunt to find and fire any government official who had “engaged in domestic censorship,” whether directly or indirectly.

He said he would order the Department of Justice to launch an investigation of what he called the “online censorship regime” and prosecute a host of civil, criminal or constitutional “offenses.”

Trump said he would ask Congress to revise Section 230, which currently provides online platforms immunity from civil prosecution for third-party content. He said to get Big Tech out of the censorship business, that immunity should only apply if they meet "high standards of neutrality, transparency, fairness and nondiscrimination."

“We need to break up the entire toxic censorship industry that has arisen under the false guise of tackling so-called mis- and disinformation,” including by refusing to fund any nonprofit or university trying to identify and weed out misinformation and disinformation. He said any university found to be doing so should not get federal funding and their students should not get federal loans for at least seven years.

Trump suggested that online platforms were being “infiltrated” by former government deep-staters, including intelligence officials, so he would call for a seven-year period before any employee of various security agencies could take a job at “a company possessing vast quantities of user data.”

He also called for a digital bill of rights, but one very different from the kind Democrats have long espoused. He said that would include a right to due process, which meant government officials would need a court order to take down online content, “not send information requests, much as the FBI was sending to Twitter.”

Trump said all users over 18 should have “the right” to “opt out of all content moderation entirely” and receive an “unmanipulated stream of information if they so choose.” ■

Following Elon Musk's internal Twitter file dump, which Republicans see as a smoking gun and Democrats as a bit of a dud, Republican Sen. Roger Wicker (Miss.), ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee, is calling its chair to hold a hearing on the state of free speech on social media, and do it before the current Congress closes its doors.

In a letter to Committee Chairman Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) a copy of which was supplied by Wicker's office, the senator said the Twitter documents suggest the company has been coordinating with the Biden Administration to censor posts.

The Administration has been reaching out to social media on what it sees as insufficient monitoring of speech on their platforms encouraging hate and violence, as well as disinformation, the definition of which -- including particularly in this case as it relates to the infamous Hunter Biden laptop story -- is at the crux of the divide between Republicans and Democrats, both of which have bones to pick with Big Tech.

Also: Wicker Says Commerce Will Review Section 230

"Two years ago, the chief executive officers of Google, Facebook, and Twitter testified before the Senate Commerce Committee (the Committee) and promised to implement changes that would build trust and increase transparency in their content moderation practices.  Instead, the leaders of these tech giants have only increased enforcement actions against prominent political voices online while continuing to elude accountability," Wicker wrote Cantwell.

Republicans say going after disinformation online is just a cover for censoring conservative speakers by liberal Silicon Valley.

Wicker said it had been two years since the full committee held a hearing on "how to preserve the internet as a forum for open discourse," and that it was past time to follow up. "Some of our colleagues and I have long suspected that Twitter and Facebook acted arbitrarily to censor a New York Post story critical of Hunter Biden that may have affected the outcome of the 2020 election," he said, adding that intervening info supports that conclusion and not the social media company's justification that they were trying to prevent Russian misinformation.

"After the release of the 'Twitter Files,' we now know Twitter was removing content at the request of the Biden campaign," Wicker claimed.

He pointed out that legislation he has backed that would limit the social media giant's ability to remove content (by revising the Section 230 immunity social media sites have from civil liability for third-party content) and create non-discrimination rules and greater transparency around content moderation hasn't gotten anywhere due to "stiff resistance" from the committee. ■

Republican leaders on the powerful Energy & Commerce Committee have officially written to complain to the White House about what they say are its attempts "to pressure private companies like Twitter and Facebook to censor certain speech or silence individuals." They want the Biden Administration to provide the committee with its communications with Big Tech.

That came after the release of some communications showing the White House sought to have what it considered disinformation removed from social media platforms.

The Republicans saw it differently. "The information revealed shows how quick Big Tech is to censor Americans to appease their Democrat allies in the White House," they told the White House.

Also: White House Issues Core Principles for Big Tech Reform

The Republicans first gave a copy of the letter seeking those communications to the New York Post, which is co-owned with Fox News, whose commentators have been critical of the Administration efforts to either crack down on misinformation and disinformation, as Democrats see it, or censor conservative critics, as Republicans allege.

"We know that administration officials and federal bureaucrats requested these companies to censor legitimate news stories and public discourse regarding the COVID-19 pandemic under the guise of combating misinformation, disinformation, and election interference," they wrote the White House Tuesday (Sept 13).

The "they" are Reps. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, ranking member of the committee, Bob Latta, ranking member on the Communications Subcommittee, and Gus Bilirakis, ranking member of the Consumer Protection Subcommittee.

Those legislators cited as an example what they said was Facebook's admission it has restricted access to apparent disinformation at the behest of the FBI, that information being related to the Hunter Biden laptop story they say Democrats and the media have downplayed for political reasons.

They also pointed to meetings between Twitter and White House officials over the speech of a conservative user of their platforms.

Those examples came following efforts by the attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri to get access to communications between the White House and social media. While they got some info, they are seeking more and the legislators want to provide some backup, asking the White House to retain and provide communications to the Committee, including related to COVID-19 conversations with employees of Facebook.

"Administration officials have previously described conservative users as their political enemies, and we have previously expressed our concern that the administration’s recent actions could lead private companies to censor conservatives due to increased White House pressure," the legislators wrote.

They want a response from the White House by Sept. 26. ■

The Biden administration condemned Russia's passage of a law that punishes journalists for what the country said was publishing “false” information about its war against Ukraine, an effort to warp the definition of disinformation to censor media outlets.

The law would levy prison sentences of up to 15 years for anyone, professional journalist or citizen journalist, for spreading “false information” about the war, the White House said.

According to Interfax, the vote on the new law was unanimous and that it amends the criminal code to penalize “false information” about Russian troops, any “discrediting” of those forces or “calls for anti-Russian sanctions.’

Also: CNN Stops Broadcasting in Russia

“To hide the truth from its own citizens, Russia’s censorship agency has shuttered independent Russian media outlets, blocked social media, and restricted access in Russia to international news outlets,” said Emily Horne, a spokesperson for the National Security Council.

Committee to Protect Journalists executive director Robert Mahoney said Putin has “plunged Russia into an information dark age by criminalizing independent reporting of his war in Ukraine.”

Irina Borogan, co-founder of Agentura.ru, a London-based website covering Russia, told CPJ that under the law, journalists must call the war a “special operation” whose goal it is to “de-Nazify” Ukraine. “I understand for Western news [consumers], it sounds absurd or crazy, but it’s how it is.” ■

Let freedom ring (up the sales) may be the new Trump motto.

The "Team Trump" backers behind former President Donald Trump's efforts to remain a political force are trying to use his lawsuit against Big Tech as a fundraising tool.

On Saturday, the joint fundraising committee of Save America and Make America Great Again PAC sent out an e-mail hawking a tee shirt emblazoned with the date 7/7/2021 (the day the suit was filed) and the message "Freedom Is Coming."

Trump is leading a class action suit against Facebook, Google and Twitter, as well as their respective CEOs Mark Zuckerberg, Sandar Pichai, and Jack Dorsey.

The former President, who had his Facebook and Twitter accounts pulled over statements about the election and Jan. 6 insurrection that were deemed potentially harmful to their respective online communities, has railed against the bans as Silicon Valley censorship in league with Democrats.

Trump last week in a setting staged to more than evoke the White House, said that the federal government "has essentially deputized social media platforms to become the de facto censorship arm of the U.S. government."

The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, seeks an "immediate halt" to their "shameful censorship" of the American people, the former president said in a press conference announcing the suit.

For its part, the Trump PAC seeks an immediate infusion of cash. "If Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube can censor President Trump, they can censor you, and believe us, they are," said the e-mail. "President Trump can and WILL win his lawsuit against these liberal Big Tech companies - FREEDOM IS COMING," it added, with a tee shirt also coming for a contribution of at least $5.

Saying he had talked with a Facebook whistle-blower and armed with visual aids, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) took to a virtual hearing stage Tuesday (Nov. 17) to grill Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on allegations that Twitter, Google and Facebook coordinated their content moderation in deciding what content to suppress.

That came at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing entitled "Breaking the News: Censorship, Suppression, and the 2020 Election."

Related: Big Tech Bigwigs to Testify

Hawley said he had been contacted by a Facebook whistle-blower with direct knowledge of the company's content-moderation practices who talked about an internal platform called "tasks."

Hawley said he understood that Facebook used the platform to "coordinate projects including censorship" by discussing, including with the other platforms, which individuals or hashtags or web sites to ban.

Zuckerberg said the "tasks" system to coordinate all kinds of work across the country, though he said he did not necessarily agree with the characterization "around content moderation."

Hawley showed a screen shot of the task platform, which he said included "censorship input" form Google and Twitter.

Using it as an "aha" moment, Hawley said that as he understood it, "Facebook censorship teams communicate with their counterparts and Google and Twitter and enter those companies' suggestions onto the tasks platform so that Facebook could follow up and essentially coordinate their censorship efforts."

Related: Hawley Slams Big Tech

He asked Zuckerberg, "under oath," whether Facebook coordinated its content moderation policies or efforts in any way with Google or Twitter."

Zuckerberg said they "do coordinate and share signals" around security issues, like a terrorist attack or child exploitation imagery or a foreign government influence operation. "That is an area where companies do share signals about what they see."

But he said that was distinct from the content-moderation policies we or the other companies have." He said each company makes its own decision about how to deal with that information.

Hawley pressed him on whether Facebook coordinated content moderation policies with Google or Twitter.

Zuckerberg said no, they do not coordinate, though he conceded "some level of communications probably happens," but that is different from coordinating. Hawley shot back that he had "clear evidence" of such coordination, which he called "unacceptable but predictable."

Zuckerberg said they share signals around specific harms, but that each company deals with those signals in line with their own policies, which is different from coordinating about what the policies should be.

Hawley was followed by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) who said she, for one, could understand why Facebook would coordinate with other platforms for security reasons.

The Consumer Technology Association said the Trump Administration's attempt to regulate online platforms that host third-party content would send the message to other countries that the U.S. is willing to regulate speech "if it offends the politically powerful."

Related: CTA Slams Trump Petition

One of the most prominent and powerful of those would-be regulators is President Trump, who has long been pushing for social media regs, alleging censorship of speech, including his own.

Thursday (Sept. 17) was the deadline for reply comments on the Trump Administration petition to the FCC asking it to come up with a framework to regulate online content within social media's Sec. 230 immunity from civil liability over most of that third-party content.

In its follow-up comments, CTA said rewriting Sec. 230, as it argues the President's petition (filed with the FCC by the National Telecommunications & Information Administration) does, would dismantle that key Sec. 230 protection.

"At a time when the American government is drawing a sharp contrast between U.S. technology leadership and Chinese online censorship, moving forward with this Petition would send the wrong message: that America, too, is willing to regulate speech when it offends the politically powerful," CTA said. "The record comprehensively demonstrates that moving forward with the Petition would hurt U.S competitiveness, violate the Constitution, and far exceed FCC authority."

In its initial comments, CTA had already called the petition a "constitutional grenade," using terms like "disastrous," "dangerous" and "unworkable."

In a "ripped from the media beat's headlines" story, most Americans said social media sites intentionally censor political viewpoints they decide are objectionable.

That is according to a new survey released Wednesday (Aug. 19) by Pew Research Center, appropriately titled "Most Americans Think Social Media Sites Censor Political Viewpoints."

The survey comes as the Trump Administration pushes to regulate social media content over allegations by the President of an anti-conservative bias, particularly after Twitter flagged tweets from the President about mail-in voting and protestors.

The Pew survey found that 73% of respondents said it is very (37%) or somewhat likely (36%) that the sites are censoring political viewpoints, while only 25% said it is not likely.

A vast majority of Republicans say that is the case, but a majority of Democrats (59%) also agree.

Respondents were pretty much split on whether social media sites should flag posts as misleading or inaccurate, with 51% saying they at least somewhat approve, while 46% said they at least somewhat disapprove.

But 66% said they do not have too much or no confidence that social media sites are able to correctly determine what content to flag.

As to whether Big Tech backs liberal views over conservative views--which is at the heart of the Trump pushback--69% of Republicans said that "major technology companies generally support the views of liberals over conservatives," while only 25% of Democrats said that is the case.

The report is based on an online survey of 4,708 U.S. adults June 16-22, 2020, using Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel. The margin of error is plus or minus eight percentage points.

Legislators on both sides of the Capitol were hammering Zoom Thursday (June 11) on reports it had closed the accounts of U.S.-based Chinese activists after they commemorated the 31st anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre pro democracy movement. That shuttering reportedly came at the behest of the Chinese government.

Zoom said it was due to "local laws."

“Zoom’s recent actions and acquiescence to China raise serious concerns about your data practices, including how you protect information you collect on Americans and, importantly, who you grant access to such information,” wrote Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.), ranking member of the House Energy & Commerce Committee, and Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), in a letter to Zoom CEO Eric Yuan.

They want answers to a lot of questions, including how it collects information on Americans, what third parties it shares that info with and whether any Chinese state-owned entities have access to that information.

Separately, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), one of Big Tech's biggest critics, wrote Yuan asking him to "pick a side." Zoom's choices, said the senator, were "American principles and free-speech, or short-term global profits and censorship."

He said trading values for profits, as he is asserting Zoom is doing, "never ends well."

“These oppressive ‘local laws’ are what Party officials use to oppress more than a billion people, including more than one million Uighurs who have been forced into slavery," said Hawley. "These ‘local laws’ are what China is using to crack down on protesters in Hong Kong who just want the basic liberties they were promised by international treaty,” Senator Hawley writes.

Zoom's videoconference tech has been much in the news as remote meetings, professional and personal, become the new normal with COVID-19.

The White House is trying to collect evidence of social media censorship and account takedowns, including tweets and screenshots of takedown notices. 

That is according to a tool on the White House website noted by Public Knowledge, which is no fan of the effort, saying it raises constitutional issues. 

Related: Trump Meets With Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey 

A number of Republicans have been complaining about alleged social media platform censorship of conservative speech, including the President and Sens. Ted Cruz and Marsha Blackburn. 

The President has accused edge providers, including Twitter in particular because he is a frequent user, of a bias against conservatives. "I have many, many followers on Twitter and it's different than it used to be," he has said. "Things are happening. Names are taken off. People aren't getting through," he told Daily Caller. "It seems to be if they are conservative, if they're Republicans, if they are a certain group, there's discrimination. I see it absolutely on Twitter, and Facebook and others," though he said he focused on "the one platform [Twitter]." 

"SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS should advance FREEDOM OF SPEECH. Yet too many Americans have seen their accounts suspended, banned, or fraudulently reported for unclear 'violations' of user policies," the White House website tool says. "No matter your views, if you suspect political bias caused such an action to be taken against you, share your story with President Trump." 

Public Knowledge has its own story to tell about social media.

"Platforms should treat their users fairly and respect norms of due process," said senior counsel John Bergmayer. "But online services have no obligation to provide a platform for content that violates their terms of service; in fact, a more pressing problem than alleged 'censorship' of any particular viewpoint is the proliferation of misinformation, propaganda, hate speech, terrorist content, and harassment online. This misguided effort by the White House raises serious constitutional questions and could hamper the ability of platforms to moderate their platforms and take down such content. 

“To the extent that particular constituencies feel that their viewpoints do not get a fair hearing, we would welcome efforts from the Trump Administration to increase platform competition through the vigorous application of antitrust laws, interoperability initiatives, and similar endeavors.”

In last week’s Hill hearings with executives from Facebook and Twitter, lawmakers seemed to focus on unique, concrete instances where problems had been reported or uncovered—Russian interference, anti-conservative censoring, encouraging opioid sales. This whack-a-mole style is good for publicity, but if trust in these companies, and peace of mind for their users, is going to be re-established, efforts toward regulation will have to focus much more on principles and hypotheticals rather than specific, undesirable cases. 

Let’s start with the basic problem. In recent years it has become widely known that Facebook and Twitter moderate a substantial portion of what we might call “important” speech in the American public sphere. Hundreds of millions of Americans use these platforms to discuss and share information about topics that, in our concept of democracy, are part of the public sphere through which collective knowledge and opinion inform self-governance. Facebook and Twitter moderate this speech. They do so in the traditional way, removing certain content, such as pornography, but also in a novel and more complex way, by influencing the pace at which messages can obtain attention and be shared with others. This “micro-moderation” is essential to their business models, but it is also impossible for a user to detect. 

Related: Zuckerberg: Facebook Fixes Will Take Years

The importance of the influence they wield through this moderation, combined with the difficulty that users have in identifying it, along with their potential monopoly power due to network effects, means that the government is on the hook for managing the situation. Whether through regulation or some other means, the government and these companies have to find a way to show that these moderation judgments are acceptable—they do the right thing often enough—and transparent— they are sufficiently understandable to be anticipated in advance and evaluated after the fact.

Establishing this acceptability with transparency requires these companies to explain and illustrate their priorities—which kinds of speech are going to be privileged and which will be limited? Unfortunately, the record of well known, past controversies that the Senators and House Members grilled the executives about is not particularly helpful here. These can be (and last week were) explained away as mistakes or misguided, but now amended, efforts. That is, they might illustrate what the company did, but not what the company would do. But the real question is not “what happened” but “what if.” 

“What if” is a part of any policy conversation, but Facebook and Twitter are particularly vulnerable to the fallout from nasty “what ifs” coming true. This is because with their enormous, well connected user bases, they are essentially giant crowdsourcing platforms for discovering hard, controversial cases. At the same time, their use of micro-moderation deprives them of easy bright lines that can be used to justify coarse judgments. 

Consider the case of potential overlap between political speech, a citizen expressing their political opinion with the goal of convincing others, and threatening speech, a statement that makes an individual feel that a mob is being rallied against them. The speaker claims the right to make this statement and the threatened individual claims the need to have it suppressed so that it does not incite others. This kind of conflict is new, and is at the center of many offline controversies (such as on university campuses). But in most contexts, the moderator can count on having a coarse set of options – permit or don’t permit – to apply to one particular incident. This incident will have a particular form—the speech is primarily political or mostly devoid of political content, for example—that helps to lean it one way or the other. This bit of lean, combined with course, binary options, enables a decision to emerge.

Social media companies do not have these luxuries. Among the millions of posts created each day, there are likely to be thousands that sit right on the borderline between the two competing claims. Moreover the moderation decision is not binary. If an individual makes a political speech that is somewhat threatening, but not so much to deserve outright censorship, should the company slow its diffusion for the sake of the potential victims? More specifically, if the company has an algorithm that helps to make certain posts viral, artificially promoting their diffusion, should it deny this threatening message access to this algorithm’s help? If so, isn’t this putting the thumb on the scale of political decision-making, e.g. creating an anti-one party bias? If not, isn’t the company creating a hostile environment?

These are the sort of discussions that Congress should be having with these executives: probing to understand how they would handle specific

situations, all of which are likely to arise, or in fact likely have already arisen, thousands of times, and then evaluating the rationales they provide for these choices. This information could then be used to draw up policies. For example, policies might help tip the scales strongly toward certain kinds of moderation decisions, essentially compelling the companies to make particular judgments in most cases but giving them the cover of complying with the law. Alternatively, they could resolve to stay out of this area, estimating that the unintended consequences of regulation might be too great. But in either case, they’d be basing this decision on an understanding of what Facebook and Twitter are doing all the time, rather than what they did one time.

Drew Margolin is professor of communication at Cornell University. He studies online communications and the role of accountability, credibility, and legitimacy in social networks.

FCC chair Ajit Pai has some advice for legislators preparing for a Sept. 5 hearing with some of the edge's biggest players, including Amazon and Twitter: Get some answers on allegations of social media sites censoring conservative speech, and seriously consider applying transparency rules about how they conduct their business similar to those the FCC has imposed on ISPs.

Related: Pai Says Twitter is Bigger Threat to Open Net Than ISPs

That came in a blog post from the chairman on the eve of that hearing in the Senate Intelligence Committee on Foreign Influence Operations' Use of Social Media Platforms.

Related: Google's Page Only 'Maybe' for Senate Hearing

The chairman said he was not calling for the kind of utility-style regulations that his FCC has just removed from ISPs, especially since he said those companies can make "certain business judgments about content on their sites."

But he did say that "we need to seriously think about whether the time has come for these companies to abide by new transparency obligations. After all, just as is the case with respect to broadband providers, consumers need accurate information in order to make educated choices about whether and how to use these tech giants’ platforms."

Pai posed his comments mostly in the form of questions, but it was not hard to divine his opinion on the subject. 

"Currently, the FCC imposes strict transparency requirements on companies that operate broadband networks — how they manage their networks, performance characteristics, and the like. Yet consumers have virtually no insight into similar business practices by tech giants. Do steps need to be taken to ensure that consumers receive more information about how these companies operate?"

He pointed out that "Tech giants have enormous and unprecedented insight into every part of our daily lives," and that he has already pointed out elsewhere that “recent experience shows that so-called edge providers are in fact deciding what content [we] see. These providers routinely block or discriminate against content they don’t like.”

Pai essentially summed up his point this way: "Are these tech giants running impartial digital platforms over which they don’t exercise editorial judgment when it comes to content? Or do they in fact decide what speech is allowed and what is not and discriminate based on ideology and/or political affiliation? And...where is the transparency?"

Pai said he hoped the hearings would help answer those questions, answers that will likely determine just how regulatory Washington becomes toward edge providers previously given something of a "garage innovators" pass from such scrutiny. 

WASHINGTON — Add President Donald Trump’s re-election team to the growing list of critics of major edge providers, a list that includes cable operators and more than a few Democratic legislators.

Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale and the Republican National Committee are “demanding” that major social media platforms promise not to discriminate against conservative outlets online. That word came in a letter to the CEOs of Facebook and Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, respectively, and Trump supporters were asked to sign as well.

“As the president’s campaign manager, I’ve written a letter demanding that the Silicon Valley social media elites stop their rampant liberal bias and stop trying to censor your voice,” Parscale said in an email from both the Trump campaign and the RNC, saying those “coastal elites” were trying to “silence and attack” Trump supporters. The letter sought information on what Facebook and Twitter were doing to prevent suppression of conservative speech.

Edge providers have been under scrutiny in Washington over a host of issues, including sex trafficking, breaches, insufficient privacy protections, Russian election meddling and a perceived liberal bias — a concern that Zuckerberg has told Congress is understandable.

Related: Reps. Square Off Over Online Censorship

RNC chair Ronna McDaniel told Fox News Channel that she and Parscale wanted to “get out ahead of” the issue of conservative censorship on social media, talk to Facebook and Twitter and ask them for transparency and to ensure everyone has a voice, particularly in advance of the midterm elections.

Parscale referenced the blocking of social media personalities Diamond and Silk, African-American Trump supporters who say Facebook was censoring their content because of their political speech. They testified at an April Hill hearing on perceived political bias. Zuckerberg said content reviewers erred and had reached out to the pair.

Parscale believes conservative voices not getting their message out is a “big problem.” The letter says that while they acknowledged Facebook and Twitter operate “in liberal corporate cultures,” the “rampant political bias” was “inappropriate.”

Parscale and the RNC are also worried about a Facebook voter registration effort. “We ask for transparency over how Facebook determines who sees these advertisements in their news feeds,” they wrote. “This is to make sure this new feature does not become essentially an in-kind contribution to liberal candidates.”