Sen. Josh Hawley Says Big Tech Wants to ‘Run Our Lives,’ ‘Rip Off’ Americans’ Sensitive Data

Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri ripped Big Tech Thursday, accusing the companies of wanting to “rip off” Americans and “run our lives.”

Hawley leveled the accusations during a Thursday night interview with “Fox News Tonight” host Piers Morgan, during which he said that technology companies own Congress. Social media companies came under fire after censoring an October 2020 New York Post report on a laptop abandoned by Hunter Biden in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election.

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“Big business and these big corporations are not content to just run our government, they want to run our lives,” Hawley told Morgan. “What they’re doing is, they’re taking our personal information, stealing it from us effectively, not paying us, not getting our consent and the only way to stop this is pass laws that protect people’s personal information and say if you’re going to take it from me, you’ve got to notify me, number one, get my consent, number two, and pay me, number three.”

Hawley proposed a ban on children under 16 acquiring social media accounts earlier this year, introducing the MATURE Act, also known as S 419, in February. The legislation requires social media companies to verify the age of those who sign up.

“I can tell you, Big Tech and these big corporations that benefit from Big Tech, they spend the money, they hire the lobbyists, they effectively control Capitol Hill and it’s time to break the logjam,” Hawley said. “It shouldn’t be that these people can run around, control our lives, can take our personal information, can rip off our most sensitive data and not have to pay us a dime for it.”

“It is time to get them out of our lives in this way. It’s time to give people control back,” Hawley continued. “They need to own their own personal information. Americans ought to own their own personal data.”