NLPC Asks Amazon’s Censors: Who in Government are You Trying to Protect?

On Wednesday, National Legal and Policy Center presented a proposal at Amazon.com, Inc’s annual shareholder meeting that would require the company to produce a semi-annual report which would itemize requests it has received from the federal government to censor users of its platforms and services.

The company’s board of directors opposed our proposal, as explained on pages 39-42 in its proxy statement.

Speaking as sponsor of the resolution was Paul Chesser, director of NLPC’s Corporate Integrity Project. A transcript of his two-minute remarks, which you can listen to here, follows:

Amazon totally misses our point in its statement of opposition to our proposal, which asks for a report on requests the Company has received from all branches of the U.S. government.

 

All we ask is for the Company to list incidents in which a government official has requested content to be removed from Amazon’s platforms.

 

But Amazon throws a bunch of lawyerly language about irrelevant policies and procedures in its opposition statement, to distract from our simple request.

 

For the purposes of our proposal’s request, my organization doesn’t care about Amazon’s sales policies.

 

Likewise, my organization doesn’t care about Amazon’s legal compliance measures.

 

My organization doesn’t care about Amazon’s content guidelines.

 

My organization doesn’t care about Amazon’s community guidelines.

 

We also don’t care how Amazon enforces any of these policies and guidelines.

 

To summarize and simplify, all we care about for the purposes of this proposal, is for Amazon to tell us who in the federal government has asked for content removal, when these government officials did it, how Amazon responded to these government officials, and why the Company responded the way it did.

 

All the information we ask for is irrelevant to any policies and processes Amazon cites in its opposition statement to our proposal.

 

There is nothing that prevents the Company from providing this information, with perhaps a few exceptions in law enforcement situations.

 

But those by far don’t account for the majority of requests Amazon has received to censor content.

 

And believe me, this is about illegal and unconstitutional censorship, not about law enforcement.

 

Amazon obviously does not want to disclose this information.

 

As we learned from the “Twitter files,” Big Tech companies willfully complied in working with government to censor based on speech and ideology.

 

So consequently, we now ask, who in the government is Amazon covering up for?

 

Please vote for Proposal number 9.

Read NLPC’s shareholder proposal for Amazon.com, Inc.’s annual meeting here.

Listen to Chesser’s two-minute remarks as delivered here.