‘Blatant Lies’: Bozell RIPS Axios for Saying No Substantial Evidence Big Tech Is Biased

July 7th, 2021 1:48 PM

On Wednesday, Media Research Center President L. Brent Bozell III slammed Axios for claiming there’s no “substantial evidence” of anti-conservative censorship online. Axios made the ridiculous claim in an article about how former President Donald Trump was suing multiple Big Tech CEOs. 

Trump unveiled lawsuits against Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Google CEO Sundar Pichai demanding restoration of his social media accounts and penalties against Big Tech companies. Liberal tech news outlet Axios responded by claiming that “To date, Trump and other conservative critics have not presented any substantial evidence that either platform is biased against conservatives in its policies or implementation of them.”

Bozell raked Axios over the coals by describing its coverage as “[b]latant lies from the leftist media.”

Free Speech America also scorched Axios for denying Big Tech censorship by summarizing some of the most infamous examples:

  • Facebook and Twitter censored the Hunter Biden story and interfered in the 2020 election 
  • Trump’s banned on 10 Big Tech sites. 
  • Our http://CensorTrack.org database has already amassed more than 2,500 examples of censorship.

What Axios didn’t tell readers is that Facebook and Twitter don’t reveal how their algorithms work. So that restricts how conservatives can respond. But it is undeniable that both Facebook and Twitter did indeed censor the Hunter Biden story in the lead up to the 2020 election.

It is equally undeniable that Facebook’s enormous content guidelines skew heavily to the left, from references to how gender is handled to the platform to restrictions on what users can or can’t post because of so-called “hate speech” rules. For example:

The site restricts comments on “protected characteristics: race, ethnicity, national origin, disability, religious affiliation, caste, sexual orientation, sex, gender identity and serious disease.”

Big Tech censorship has already had a devastating and quantifiable impact on the course of American history as seen on MRC Free Speech America’s CensorTrack database

A post-election poll from the Media Research Center, conducted by McLaughlin & Associates, also sheds light on how censorship impacted our nation. The poll showed that 36 percent of Biden voters were NOT aware of the evidence linking then-presidential candidate Joe Biden to potentially corrupt financial dealings with China through his son Hunter. Thirteen percent of these voters (or 4.6 percent of Biden’s total vote) said that had they known these facts, they would not have voted for the former Vice President.

In a shocking story released by the New York Post on October 14, purported emails from then-Democratic presidential candidate Biden’s son Hunter Biden reportedly exposed the alleged corrupt dealings of both father and son in Ukraine. The story reportedly found emails from a Ukrainian executive Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of Burisma, thanking Hunter Biden for the opportunity to meet his father Joe Biden in Washington D.C. Twitter, following Facebook’s lead, responded by disabling the link, claiming: “Warning: this link may be unsafe.”

Twitter alone censored Trump 625 times between May 31, 2018 and January 4, 2021 before he was kicked off of the platform. It has since refused to allow him back on the platform. Twitter did not censor Biden at all during the same period of time. Trump was banned from at least nine other platforms after the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, during which the former President called for “peace.”

He was kicked off of YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Twitch, Stripe, Snapchat, Reddit, TikTok and even Shopify. Facebook announced that the former president would be suspended for at least two years.

World leaders have condemned Big Tech companies for censoring Trump and conservatives. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador slammed Big Tech for behaving “as a sort of Spanish Inquisition.” French President Emmanuel Macron also torched Big Tech for choosing to “suddenly cut the mic” and silence “all the platforms where it was possible for [former-President Donald Trump] and his supporters to express themselves,” AP News reported back on February 4. 

Conservatives are under attack. Contact your local 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.