As major tech companies are summoned one by one to Capitol Hill to testify, like misbehaving toddlers, about the extent to which they unwittingly facilitated Russian meddling in the 2016 election, the glossy Silicon Valley starlets that once enchanted congresspeople are beginning to lose their shine. Lawmakers are weighing whether to follow in the U.K.’s footsteps and introduce stricter regulations for tech companies. In September, House and Senate Democrats sent a letter to the Federal Election Commission urging it to regulate online political ads the same way it would ads in other mediums. And a bipartisan group of senators last month unveiled a bill called the Honest Ads Act, which would require Internet companies to adhere to federal disclosure regulations. As the rumblings grow louder despite years of bipartisan lobbying efforts on the part of Big Tech, it’s not entirely surprising that Donald Trump’s Federal Communications Commission chairman, Ajit Pai, latched onto the same narrative to defend his plan to completely eradicate Obama-era net-neutrality policies.

On Tuesday, Pai, who claims that net-neutrality rules stymie broadband investment in the U.S., took on his critics during an event in Washington, D.C., claiming that Big Tech companies’ content moderation is a bigger threat to a free and open Internet than a net-neutrality rollback. “They might cloak their advocacy in the public interest,” he said, “but the real interest of these internet giants is in using the regulatory process to cement their dominance in the Internet economy.”

He explicitly argued that Twitter’s decision to moderate content on its platform was the real threat, citing the company’s decision in October to block a campaign ad for Senate candidate Marsha Blackburn over an “inflammatory” line about abortion. “Now, look, I love Twitter,” Pai said. “But let’s not kid ourselves; when it comes to a free and open Internet, Twitter is a part of the problem. The company has a viewpoint and uses that viewpoint to discriminate. And, unfortunately, Twitter is not an outlier,” he added. “Indeed, despite all the talk and all the fear that broadband providers could decide what Internet content consumers can see, recent experience shows that so-called edge providers [the F.C.C.’s term for services like Google and Facebook] are, in fact, deciding what content they see. These providers routinely block or discriminate against content they don’t like.” (A spokesperson for Twitter told CNN that the ad was not censored, as “anyone voluntarily following her account could see it.”)

Singling out Twitter users with outsized clout, Pai blamed the likes of Cher, Mark Ruffalo, and Kumail Nanjiani for stoking opposition to net-neutrality repeal. “We need quality information, not hysteria, because hysteria takes us to unpleasant, if not dangerous places,” he said, in a transparent attempt to portray support for net neutrality as a position of the left-wing elite—never mind the fact that Twitter will always have the power to regulate the content on its platform, net-neutrality guidelines notwithstanding.

Pai’s speech comes a month before the F.C.C. is expected to vote on the rollback, which would theoretically allow Internet service providers like Comcast and Verizon to charge companies for faster Internet access, slow down or speed up services like Netflix or YouTube, and block access to web pages. Though I.S.P.s have said they would never do such things, and would, in fact, welcome laws that ban throttling content, Internet activists are not convinced. “Such a plan would not preserve Internet freedom, but rather would destroy it by handing over the Internet to Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon,” Ernesto Falcon, legislative counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told me earlier this year. “The F.C.C. should be fighting to enforce our rights, not negotiating the terms of their demise.”