On Wednesday’s broadcast of CNN’s “The Lead,” Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-CA) criticized the pressure on tech platforms to censor by the Biden administration and stated that FCC Chairman Brendan Carr “made statements that he should not have, and if the power of government is being brought to bear, in any way, to try to restrict speech or to try to chill speech, that’s a serious problem. I think there’s some debate as to whether that is actually what happened here, or whether it was a business decision by ABC or by the local affiliates.”

Kiley said, “[Y]ou’ve now had admissions from the leading tech companies, Alphabet, as well as Facebook and Twitter/X, saying that we had this era of censorship in the United States, where you had the federal administration that pressured and potentially coerced these platforms to take down content. And it’s especially bad when you think about where we were during the COVID pandemic, especially in the beginning, when folks were not allowed to go to work, you’re not allowed to go to school, legislatures and every unit of local government is shut down. The one way that citizens had to exercise their rights as citizens in a democracy was to post on social media. And you had the systemic effort by the government to stop them from doing so, to stop them from posting about one of the most consequential issues of the last generation, which is the government response to COVID-19, and, in some cases, even censoring true information, like the origins of where the virus came from.”

Later, host Jake Tapper asked, “Do you have any concerns, given what you have said, given what I just read from Alphabet, about what just happened with FCC Chair Brendan Carr announcing that he thinks local stations should be taking Jimmy Kimmel off the air, after which they did, and 20% of ABC stations didn’t air Kimmel last night when it returned to air. Does that concern you at all?”

Kiley answered, “Yeah. Clearly, the commissioner’s made statements that he should not have, and if the power of government is being brought to bear, in any way, to try to restrict speech or to try to chill speech, that’s a serious problem. I think there’s some debate as to whether that is actually what happened here, or whether it was a business decision by ABC or by the local affiliates. But I think this is a principle that, in every administration, Congress needs to be prepared to defend, is that, for folks who are upset about conservative voices being censored, which should be all Americans, the answer is not to censor liberal voices. The answer is to disavow censorship across the board. Censorship is a great evil that is a total disavowal…of the values of the Enlightenment and the principles of our Constitution, and so I think that needs to apply across the board.”

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett