NASHVILLE, Tenn.--A Tennessee lawmaker wants social media platforms to be fined if they ban users based on political views or discriminate against users.

HB0682/SB0111 is sponsored by Representative Dennis Powers (R-Jacksboro-D36) and Senator Bo Watson (R-Hixson-D11). The bill would designate social media platforms as common carriers and require they obtain certificates from the Tennessee public utilities commission. In essence, the designation would mean social media platforms would move from being a private carrier to public and available for anyone who requests their services.

As the bill states, this would mean social platforms are unable to deplatform or ban users for political ideology, viewpoint, or discrimination based on race, creed, color, religion, sex, age, or national origin.

The bill adds "the concentration of market power among a handful of social media platforms gives such platforms enormous control over speech and its dissemination by hundreds of millions of users. Google controls speech by suppressing content by deindexing or downlisting a search result, and by steering users away from content by manually altering search results and algorithms. Facebook and Twitter can greatly narrow a person's information flow through similar manipulation. Amazon, as the distributor of the majority of e-books and roughly half of physical books in the United States, could impose cataclysmic consequences on authors by blocking a listing."

Given the language, the bill adds the social platforms are not acting in good faith and should be designated as common carriers.

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