Big Tech has worked hard to influence the 2020 presidential election to aid the left.
The major social media sites have restricted conservative content, censored the president of the United States and even silenced content from a major news organization because it embarrassed the Democrat nominee.
Facebook and Twitter smothered a bombshell story from the New York Post that scandalized the Biden Campaign in mid-October. The same two companies have also censored Trump 65 times while leaving his opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, unrestricted.
The same type of censorship has fallen on conservatives and pro-Trump posters for questioning the vulnerabilities of mail-in voting and voicing their concerns that mailing votes could lead to voter fraud and errors, despite the fact liberal outlets have acknowledged this in past elections.
Yet tech executives are unwilling to admit their ability to influence American politics. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation on October 28. The hearing, “Does Section 230’s Sweeping Immunity Enable Big Tech Bad Behavior?” featured Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) who slammed the absurdity of Big Tech liberals blaming Russia for election interference via social media, while pretending Big Tech platforms have no influence themselves:
“You all believe that Russia has the ability to influence the elections or interfere by using your social platforms. Mr. Dorsey, do you still deny that you don’t have the ability to influence and interfere in our elections?”
Dorsey replied “Twitter, as a company? No.”
Liberal Google researcher Dr. Robert Epstein, a senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, has warned that Big Tech could change the course of the election. Epstein also recently stated that Google may be “shifting power” to flip the Senate.
Epstein has specifically warned that Big Tech is capable of targeting individuals: “Google and Facebook have millions of pieces of information about every American voter, and they will be targeting their manipulations at the individual level for every single voter in every swing state. No one in the world except Google and Facebook can do that.”
Here are the top 8 ways social media companies have tried to influence the election:
1. Censoring Stories to Protect Biden
The most damning evidence that Big Tech has rigged the election is that it worked to silence the biggest political scandal in recent history.
Big Tech companies recently made headlines for censoring a New York Post article. The shocking revelation released by the Post on Oct. 14, cited purported emails from Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son Hunter and reportedly exposed the alleged scandalous dealings of both father and son in the Russia-bordering state of Ukraine.
Facebook responded by reducing the story’s circulation on its platform, crippling its ability to spread. Twitter responded by disabling the link to the story, claiming: “Warning: this link may be unsafe.” Twitter then censored the Post, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, the Trump Campaign, and even the House Judiciary (a part of the United States government) for sharing the story.
2. Overwhelmingly Censoring Trump Over Biden: 65 to 1
Big Tech has caused serious damage to Trump’s ability to be heard on social media.
Twitter and Facebook have censored the president’s social media accounts and the accounts belonging to his re-election campaign at least 65 times. In contrast, the companies have not censored Biden and his campaign accounts — at all.
Twitter composes the bulk of the problem, with 98 percent of all the instances of censorship. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Twitter has made the decision to censor major headlines about the Biden family, particularly when it came to the New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s dealings with Ukraine.
The Media Research Center’s Techwatch department analyzed two years of social media posts from Trump, Biden, and their respective campaigns. The analysis did not include any ads from PACs or super PACs that had made ads in favor of either candidate. It also focused on social media posts, not paid advertisements, from the campaigns. These numbers were collected from between May 2018 to October 16, 2020.
3. Censoring Concerns Over Mail-in Voting
Conservatives are censored in 2020 for criticizing mail-in voting’s susceptibility to fraud and error, but liberal media outlets made the same critiques in past elections when it served their interests to do so.
The liberal media, Big Tech, and the political establishment have teamed up in an unholy alliance to silence conservatives’ concerns that mailing in votes could lead to voter fraud. Trump was fact-checked by Twitter for condemning “Mail-In Ballots” as “substantially fraudulent” in May. Since then, Big Tech has continued its scorched earth policy against Trump and fellow conservatives for questioning the vulnerabilities of mail-in voting.
GOP Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel called out Twitter for censoring critiques of mail-in voting earlier this year: “Twitter falsely claims there is no evidence of mail-in ballot fraud.” She added: “That’s odd since NJ’s all-mail primary this month was ‘plagued’ by fraud concerns, with 3,000 votes set aside.” She later noted that “Ballots were stolen out of mailboxes.” Included in the tweet was a NBC article headlined: “Close Results In Paterson Vote Plagued By Fraud Claims; Over 3K Ballots Seemingly Set Aside.”
Outlets across the political spectrum have recently announced mail-in voting errors and fraud in multiple states.
4. Allowing Far-Left to Coordinate, Mobilize Against Conservative Leaders
Facebook executives have claimed they are restricting content to prevent “civil unrest.” But Facebook has repeatedly censored or banned groups on the right, while allowing reportedly violent Antifa factions and left-wing militia organizations.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had explained his concerns about upcoming civil unrest in an early September interview with Axios: "I think we need to be doing everything that we can to reduce the chances of violence or civil unrest in the wake of this election." He then went on to claim: "We're trying to make sure that we do our part to make sure that none of this is organized on Facebook.”
But the record shows that he has not taken sufficient action. Even after being contacted about what major media describe as violent groups such as Rose City Antifa and foreign political interference like far-left Canadian organization Adbusters, Facebook has proven it has not followed through on its commitment to reduce political unrest amidst the 2020 election.
Also, in mid-September Facebook allowed activists to organize on the platform to harass sitting U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) at his purported home address about how he intends to vote concerning a replacement for deceased Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the U.S. Supreme Court.
5. Overwhelmingly Contributing to Democratic Party Campaigns
A majority of Big Tech company employees appear to have voted with their wallets for Joe Biden.
“Joining Amazon, Alphabet's Google and Microsoft are among the top five contributors to Joe Biden's candidate campaign committee in the 2020 cycle, according to data from OpenSecrets, a website which tracks money in politics and campaign finance records,” noted Reuters.
Affiliates of Alphabet, Inc., Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and Apple have donated $4,357,885 to the Biden campaign during the 2020 presidential race, according to OpenSecrets. Trump received only $287,549 from aforementioned Big Tech companies.
Reuters also mentioned that “[t]he firms are prohibited by law from donating themselves. The contributions were either made by the company’s political action committees (PACs) themselves, members of the PAC or their employees.”
6. Enabling Chinese Propaganda, Misinfo to Hurt Trump (While Censoring Americans)
Twitter has infamously allowed blatant Chinese propaganda to be spread among Americans.
Two such examples of this would be when Twitter allowed a Chinese official to scapegoat the U.S. Twitter allowed China to scapegoat the American military as the source of the virus when Spokesperson & Deputy Director General, Information Department, Foreign Ministry of China Lijian Zhao posted articles suggesting the Wuhan virus originated in the United States. Zhao speculated in a tweet: “It might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan.” The Chinese Embassy in France uploaded an absurd, lego-based propaganda video at 10:54 a.m. Apr 30. The Ambassade de Chine en France’s video “Once Upon a Virus…” featured numerous demonstrably untrue myths, acting as if the Chinese communist government and World Health Organization (“WHO”) have both been forthcoming about the nature of the COVID-19 pandemic.
WHO was too reliant on Chinese authorities, and misinformed nations around the globe that there was “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission” of COVID-19 as late as January 14.
Meanwhile, Big Tech companies like Facebook have actively censored articles speculating on China’s role in spreading the virus. Facebook censored a Fox News article with the damning claim from a “top virologist and whistleblower” that “the Chinese government intentionally manufactured and released the COVID-19 virus that led to mass shutdowns and deaths across the world.”
7. Allows Deceptive Edits about Trump, Bans Embarrassing Footage of Biden
The only standards that Big Tech have on misinformation appear to be double-standards.
An embarrassing clip of then-Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden stammering during a speech had been spun by the liberal media as “manipulated media.” The clip, posted on March 7 by White House social media director Dan Scavino, showed Biden stammering: “Because we can not get re-elect, we can not win this re-election. Excuse me, we can only re-elect Donald Trump.”
Meanwhile, Twitter has allowed deceptively edited clips of Trump to circulate across the internet.
“According to emails reviewed by The Hill, the Trump campaign flagged new content on Twitter that it said had been deceptively edited,” The Hill’s Jonathan Easly wrote on March 16. One video in question was shared by Mike Bloomberg’s former senior adviser Tim O’Brien and featured audio clips of Trump’s words spliced together and taken out of context, set to a rising graph showing “Confirmed Coronavirus Cases in US.” Biden tweeted a video with similar language. The most damning part from the videos was Trump saying, “Coronavirus” edited together with “this is their new hoax,” as if Trump were denying the existence of the disease. This was not the case, and it was openly used to damage Trump’s reputation amidst a pandemic.
8. Big Tech Overhauls Ad Policies to Shaft Trump
Big Tech at times cautiously allows conservatives to speak freely, until far-left lobbies come knocking.
Google flip-flopped on its ad policies after massive pushback by liberals who complained that they could specifically benefit the Trump campaign. YouTube, a sister company to Google, has also been infamous for its liberal bias. YouTube had removed over three hundred ads from Trump’s reelection campaign over the Summer of 2019 alone.
Guerilla journalism group Project Veritas published a video showing Google Responsible Innovation Head Jen Gennai suggesting that “breaking up Google” would not “prevent the next Trump situation.” She also mused how changes in Google’s secret algorithms could have prevented his election from happening in the first place.
Google, knowing that conservative websites depend on making money from ad revenue, has refused service to conservative websites based on rhetoric Google staffers found offensive.
Donald Trump, Jr. recently accused Google of “election interference” after the search engine giant had reportedly demonetized skeptic news website ZeroHedge and sent a warning that it would take similar action against The Federalist. NBC News alleged that “A Google spokesperson said in an email on Monday that it demonetized the websites after determining they violated its policies on content related to race.”
Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representative and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on “hate speech” and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us at the Media Research Center contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
