A Republican state representative has introduced a bill that would make it illegal in Michigan for social media companies such as Google or Facebook to “censor, ban, shadow-ban” or use other means to exercise viewpoint discrimination against users on the basis of the person’s political opinions.

State Rep. John Reilly of Oakland Township introduced House Bill 4801 on June 26. A press release from the Michigan House Republican caucus cited a Project Veritas undercover sting that secretly recorded a Google executive, Jen Gennai, saying that her company is focused on “never letting somebody like Donald Trump come to power again.”

The bill has been referred to the House Communications and Technology Committee, chaired by Rep. Michele Hoitenga, R-Manton.

“This isn’t a question of property rights. This is a question of fraud,” Reilly said in the press release. “In this modern era, social media networks are the new public square. Banning – and worse, secretly banning while deceiving the user into believing their content is being shared equally – excludes individuals from public life.”

Reilly continued: “Social media companies cannot eat their cake and have it too. They cannot enjoy the privileges of being a platform, such as immunity from liability for users’ content, while also enjoying the privileges of being a publisher to control what everyone may or may not say on their network.”

Antony Davies, an associate professor of economics at Duquesne University, said in an email that there is a distinction between a government entity and a private enterprise.

“Where Google and Facebook are concerned, it may be time for everyone to take a deep breath,” said Davies. (Davies is a member of the Board of Scholars at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, which publishes Michigan Capitol Confidential.)

“But a private enterprise is funded through cooperation. You agree to provide something to the private enterprise and the private enterprise agrees to provide something to you. You and it cooperate in making both you and it better off,” Davies said. “At any point, you are free to walk away from the enterprise. In some cases, like in choosing a grocery store, walking away is easy. In others, like choosing an employer, it’s harder. But the relationship between you and the enterprise is voluntary.”

Davies continued: “Google and Facebook are private enterprises. Facebook has every right to censor and even ban people. I believe that is, generally, a bad business decision and it definitely makes Facebook less valuable to a lot of users. But Facebook has the right to walk away from its relationship with us just as we have the right to walk away from our relationship with Facebook.”

Davies said that decisions to promote one political viewpoint over another will eventually be bad for business.

“Because Google and Facebook are private enterprises, when enough people finally get fed up with their content controls, people will walk away and the websites will fade into obscurity as quickly as they emerged. Don’t believe me? Ask the former employees at the once high-flying AltaVista, Yahoo, or MySpace,” Davies said.

He added that politicians should not be involved in how a private business conducts itself.

“Politicians’ efforts to dictate how Google and Facebook control content on their platforms dangerously blur the important distinction between public and private enterprises,” Davies said.

The legislation would amend the state Consumer Protection Act to explicitly prohibit “a provider of an interactive computer service” that represents itself as “viewpoint neutral, impartial, or nonbiased” from taking certain actions based on a user’s political views. It could not: “block a user's speech; censor a user's speech; ban a user; remove a user’s speech; shadow ban a user; deplatform a user; deboost a user; demonetize a user; otherwise restrict the speech of a user.”

The act authorizes lawsuits by individuals, prosecutors or the state attorney general, and empowers courts to impose damage awards, enjoin (halt) specific practices, or issue declaratory judgment that a method, act, or practice is unlawful.

A former president of the local teachers union at the River Rouge School District claimed that the district’s teachers took a 15% pay cut in 2011 and have only received half of it back since then.

“Teachers are making less than they did 11 years ago,” said Eddie Hejka in a recent Detroit Free Press story. Hejka earned $80,273 in 2016-17, his last full year of teaching at the Wayne County district.

State salary records for five River Rouge teachers, while not definitive, do not lend credence to his claim. Teachers at the district, like virtually every other district in Michigan, are covered by a union contract. Therefore, salaries of individual teachers can be representative of many.

Michigan Capitol Confidential looked at the changing salaries of five randomly chosen high school teachers at the district over the past five years, using state data covering 2013-14 to 2017-18.

All the salary figures include the individual’s base salary plus extra amounts earned by performing additional duties at the district, such as working summer school or serving as a department head.

One of the educators was a high school math teacher who started at River Rouge right out of college in 2013. As a first-year teacher with a bachelor’s degree, he received the base salary of $37,436, as prescribed by the union contract then in effect. With four years, he was earning $50,800.

Another high school teacher, who started in 1995, had accumulated 24 years of experience by this year. This teacher’s salary was $76,390 in 2013-14, which increased to $78,803 in 2017-18. The modest $2,413 increase is typical for high-seniority teachers who have topped out on the union-negotiated pay scales that are the norm in Michigan school districts.

The salary of a high school resource teacher increased from $47,565 in 2013-14 to $55,244 in 2017-18, a 16% raise over a four-year period.

A high school English teacher saw her salary increase from $63,329 in 2013-14 to $70,736 in 2017-18. That’s a 12% increase over a four-year period.

According to the River Rouge contract, teachers hit the top of the scale in the ninth year of employment. But in some instances, the contracts allows for very large raises. For example, a teacher who had a bachelor's degree in his eighth year would have earned $63,281 in 2017-18. If that same teacher had just attained a master's degree, his salary would increase to $78,184 in the next year. That’s almost a $15,000 increase in one year, but with an expectation of much smaller increases going forward.

Another high school teacher in the district collected a salary of $52,394 in 2015-16. By 2017-18, that teacher’s salary had increased to $70,745. That teacher also became head of a department, which would have given him added compensation.

According to the state of Michigan, the average teacher’s salary in the state was $61,908 in 2017-18. The amount of pay for a teacher can vary greatly depending upon the district. The average teacher’s salary at River Rouge was $60,579 in 2017-2018.