It’s truly incredible at this point that anyone could deny the tech giants are discriminating against conservatives to an almost comical extent. Yet, may on the left still do. Of course, they do this while simultaneously demanding that tech companies actually do ban speech, which is always defined (by them) as “hate speech.” A very interesting approach, to say nothing else.
In some cases, this is too obvious to deny. Alex Jones was basically kicked off the entirety of social media in one day in what seemed to be a fairly obvious case of collusion. YouTube, Facebook, Spotify, Vimeo, Linkedin, and Pinterest all gave him the boot. Only Twitter held out, for a very short while, before doing the same.
Alex Jones is, of course, a ludicrous conspiracy theorist who has said all sorts of wild and inflammatory things, such as the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax and something about gay frogs. But it’s not hard to find plenty on the left who have committed all sorts of similar “crimes.” But should tech companies really be deciding who can speak in the modern equivalent of the public square?
Progressives will respond, of course, that the First Amendment does not apply to multibillion-dollar, multinational quasi-monopolistic corporate conglomerates. Private companies can do and say what they want (as long as they are multibillion-dollar corporate conglomerates and not Ma and Pa bakeries that gross a few hundred thousand dollars a year, of course).
Obviously, this seems rather suspect. Can the gas company turn off your gas because they don’t like what you say? Furthermore, such arbitrary bannings should move Facebook, Twitter, and the like into the sphere of publishers instead of platforms. And publishers are held liable for everything posted on their sites.
And yes, arbitrary. Look at all the fake news floating around these days. You could start with the New York Times, which printed Judith Miller’s completely discredited claims of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, pushed the Duke Lacrosse rape hoax harder than anyone, repeated the “hands up, don’t shoot” lie and had a correspondent who ran cover for Stalin while he was committing genocide against the Ukrainians.
Or how about Rolling Stone, which without a hint of self-awareness lobbied against the spectre of fake news despite pushing the most blatant hoax in recent memory. Then, of course, there’s CNN, which the Daily Caller has just put together a “sight to behold” of 20 recent fake news stories and retractions by that outlet. Examples include falsely claiming Anthony Scaramucci was under investigation for ties to Russia and that Comey would contradict Trump about whether the President was being investigated.
Or we could move outside the “respectable” outlets on the left and ask why Louise Mensch still has a Twitter account if fake news is a problem. This is the woman who claimed Putin had Andrew Breitbart killed to install Steve Bannon at Breitbart.com and that Trump was being replaced by Senator Orrin Hatch, all of which turned out to be just regurgitated nonsense from a hoaxer feeding her fake news.
Or you could peruse the quality of content from the likes of EveryDayFeminism.com, TheRoot.com or Marxist.com and ask why they are allowed to stay.
Furthermore, if it’s about “violating the terms of service,” one must ask why virtually every Antifa account remains unmolested. Just peruse through Far Left Watch’s Twitter feed to see the wonderful things those on the far Left have been saying. Some blue checkmark examples include Vegan Wizard saying pithily “Kill Donald Trump” and Greater Seattle GDC pushing to dox ICE agents.
If you look through the Wikipedia list of people Twitter has suspended or banned, many are extremists and Nazis. Although it should be noted that both Richard Spencer and David Duke still have their Twitter accounts. And of course the anti-white, anti-male nutjob Sarah Jeong, who was recently hired as an editor for the New York Times, has hers (along with that coveted blue checkmark). It would seem like Spencer’s and Duke’s extreme rhetoric is a turn off to most people and they therefore don’t need to be silenced. Instead, relatively mainstream conservatives such as Gavin McInnes has his Twitter removed and Candace Owens has hers temporarily suspended for a blatantly satirical tweet. On the other hand, the number of communists Wikipedia notes as having been banned: zero.
Twitter has also been routinely accused of “shadow banning,” which means not showing controversial users’ tweets in their followers feeds or on hashtags. This was deemed a “conspiracy theory” until Twitter admitted it while simultaneously denying it by changing the meaning of the term, saying,
“We do not shadow ban. You are always able to see the tweets from accounts you follow (although you may have to do more work to find them, like go directly to their profile).”
“I didn’t rob you, I just took your stuff without permission.”
Twitter eventually admitted to “unfairly filtering” 600,000 accounts, including several Republican candidates! They say they’ve fixed that now. Or perhaps they’re afraid of government regulation and are pulling back now that the pressure is on.
And let’s not forget that James O’Keefe caught Twitter employees on camera admitted they censor conservative accounts.
Facebook has also banned a lot of prominent conservatives, including the popular Diamond and Silk (although they reinstated them after the pushback when it was determined to be an “enforcement error”). In mid-February, Facebook implemented a new “trusted sources” algorithm. A study by Western Journal found that afterward, liberal websites increased their traffic by two percent while conservative sites saw theirs plummet by 14 percent.
And then there’s Google. It would be hard to imagine that the company that fired James Damore for releasing an internal memo stating the scientific consensus’ on gender differences could be unbiased. And, of course, they aren’t.
Damore’s lawsuit itself (which was thrown out) had some pretty wild claims. For example, that Google maintains a blacklist of conservative personalities not allowed on company grounds and that white males are booed at company meetings. And while not all of this provable, we do know that Google will celebrate some obscure, Osama Bin Laden-apologizing Marxist with its doodles while all but ignoring Memorial Day.
Just type some political event or figure into Google and see what happens. I just typed in “Brett Kavanaugh” into Google and the first three results at the top bar were CNN, the NYT and The Hill; two leftwing, one center right. The three videos were MSNBC, the Guardian and Fox News; two left, one right. The articles on the first page other than Wikipedia were CNN, The Nation, Esquire, the Washington Post, Business Insider, CNN again, the NYT again and Slate. That’s seven leftwing sources, one center and one entertainment site. Very balanced.
Not surprisingly, a research report by Leo Goldstein found that “Google’s search functionality ‘is found to be biased in favor of left/liberal domains,’ and ‘against conservative domains’ with what he calls a confidence of 95 percent” and an analysis by CanIRank.com found that “50 recent searches for political terms on Google surfaced more liberal leaning webpages than conservative ones, as rated by a panel of four people.” Google’s fact-checking feature also appears to only target conservative sites. And it should also be remembered that it appears Google was manipulating the auto complete feature during the 2016 election to benefit Hillary Clinton, although Google denied this.
Many of these tech companies are becoming something of a government of the Internet akin to the way The East India company governed India until the Sepoy Rebellion. I’m generally not a fan of government regulation, but the risk of turning the Internet over to unaccountable tech companies all but ensures a one-party state. Something needs to be done.
