After years of liberals scapegoating Russian interference for their 2016 defeat, they have turned up the heat on Big Tech to prevent that from happening again. Now, Silicon Valley is doing its best to ensure that President Donald Trump is defeated in November.
Several Big Tech companies have made calculated policy reforms, bowing to leftist demands and bending under the weight of a growing advertising boycott. The result is an effort to rig the outcome of the presidential election under the pretext of fighting so-called hate. It’s what President of the Media Research Center Brent Bozell declared two weeks ago that “Big Tech has already made its choice for president in November.”
In the past month, Trump and his followers have been increasingly censored by major Big Tech platforms. Twitch, Twitter, and Snapchat have censored Trump himself. Meanwhile, his followers on Reddit and other platforms have been purged. If that weren’t bad enough, platforms have been used to derail his campaign’s efforts. YouTube restricted no less than 300 pro-Trump ads in the Summer of 2019 alone; Chinese government overseen platform TikTok was reportedly used to sabotage a Trump campaign rally; and prominent liberal Google critic Dr. Robert Epstein wrote that Google gave at least 2.6 million votes to Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016 and that it could sway “upward of 15 million votes” in the Democrats’ favor in 2020.
Based on the record of recent events, it’s easy to see that Big Tech’s meddling into politics would put conspiracies about Russian interference to shame.
Just yesterday, Reddit purged politically incorrect forums, including: r/The_Donald, r/ChapoTrap and about 2,000 other communities. The platform reportedly issued a policy update after “Black Lives Matter protests led several popular Reddit forums to go dark temporarily in protest of what they called the company’s lax policies around hosting and promoting racist content.”
Reddit also updated its terms of service with a blog “Promoting Hate Based on Identity or Vulnerability,” which unabashedly proclaimed it will enforce a double standard on who is allowed to be criticized. In short, a person who is in the “racial minority” may call somebody in the racial majority “sub-human and inferior” with impunity.
Twitch
That same day, video game broadcasting platform Twitch, owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, “temporarily banned President Trump’s account for 'hateful conduct' stemming from footage of the president’s speeches,” Fox News reported.
Trump speculated in a late June interview with The Federalist publisher Ben Domenech that his Twitter account’s days are numbered. The president and “others in the White House” reportedly believe Twitter will ban him this Fall, shortly before the 2020 election itself. But if the platform does ban Trump, as the president suggested, doing so may “hurt them more than they realize.”
Twitter has only grown bolder about its censorship as the election approaches. In late May, Twitter fact-checked Trump for suggesting that mail-in ballots could lead to voter fraud, a concern even The New York Times has acknowledged to be valid.
Twitter followed up by placing an interstitial, or filter, over Trump’s tweet condemning violent riots over the death of Minneapolis resident George Floyd in police custody. It acted similarly in June when Trump vowed to meet rioters who would destroy Washington, D.C. “with serious force.”
Even before these most recent acts of censorship, Twitter had racked up an impressive record of liberal bias, including allowing blatant Chinese propaganda to be spread among Americans. Two examples of this would be when Twitter allowed a Chinese official to scapegoat the U.S. military for spreading the virus and when the platform allowed a lego-based propaganda video published by a Chinese embassy erroneously blasting the American government for not handling the virus properly.
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.”
Google also flip-flopped on its ad policies after massive pushback by liberals who complained that they could specifically benefit the Trump campaign. 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.
YouTube
YouTube, a sister company to Google, has also been infamous for its liberal bias. YouTube has removed hundreds of ads from Trump’s reelection campaign over the Summer of 2019 alone.
If Big Tech censorship wasn’t cartoonishly evil enough, YouTube, which is blocked in China by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has allegedly censored comments on China’s behalf. Oculus and Anduril founder Palmer Luckey claimed that YouTube deleted his comments on its platform. He tweeted, “YouTube has deleted every comment I ever made about the Wumao ((五毛), an internet propaganda division of the Chinese Communist Party.”
According to a 950-page leak from Google whistleblower Zachary Vorhies, YouTube has a “Twiddler” system for ranking search results in order to bury content the platform’s consider controversial.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, having previously given lip service to the notion of free speech on his platform, has recently been bullied through internal and external pressure to alter Facebook’s policies. He declared in a livestream that his platform would adopt “ some new policies to prohibit a wider category of hateful content in ads.” He further stated, “we want to do more here to prohibit the kind of divisive and inflammatory rhetoric that is being used to sow discord.” [Emphasis added.]
Zuckerberg also outlined new policies aimed at comments from politicians — in other words, Trump. “Even if a politician or government official says it, if we determine that content may lead to violence or deprive people of their right to vote, we will take that content down,” he said.
TikTok
A newcomer to Big Tech, Chinese government overseen app TikTok’s users took credit for sabotaging a Trump rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Multiple outlets revealed that internet users gleefully trolled the Trump campaign. “[T]he idea to troll President Donald Trump with false ticket reservations to Saturday's rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma came from TikTok,” NBC News reported.
Snapchat
Snapchat recently decided to stop Trump from being able to promote himself on the platform in the same way other public figures and politicians do to reach young voters. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel cited that the First Amendment is written to “protect individuals and private businesses from the government.” What he failed to mention was that Section 230 protections are themselves a form of government regulation that can be changed.
Conservatives are under attack. 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.
