The Heritage Foundation has warned Americans against believing that Big Tech oligarchs want substantive reform while censorship continues on.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai called President-elect Donald Trump in late November, Amazon.com owner Jeff Bezos wouldn’t allow his paper (The Washington Post) to endorse Democrat candidate Kamala Harris and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg paid an in-person visit to Trump at Mar-a-Lago, reportedly claiming to be ready and eager to help Trump with a “reform movement” of technology. But since both Google and Meta continue to censor free speech, Heritage warned, “Do not trust Mark Zuckerberg,” Meta, Google or the other Big Tech companies.
The Heritage Foundation posted the warning against trusting Big Tech on Dec. 3, adding, “Meta was still censoring right-wing content in the lead up to Election Day, and there’s no indication that it won’t continue whenever it’s politically convenient.” Indeed, Facebook has continued to censor users after the election, including Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), as MRC’s unique CensorTrack database shows. Google also continued to display extreme leftist bias in its manipulation of search results on and following Election Day, as MRC studies continue to show.
MRC Vice President for Free Speech Dan Schneider said, “The Heritage Foundation is right to warn Americans against implicitly trusting Big Tech CEOs who have been violating Americans’ First Amendment rights for years. Major reforms need to be implemented before these CEOs gain credibility.”
The Heritage Foundation’s X post included a video showing its Tech Policy Center director Kara Frederick explaining that Big Tech oligarchs are not trustworthy. “There is an extensive CYA campaign — you might have seen Mark Zuckerberg came out, and said [in a letter], ‘Oh, you know, we did wrong when we suppressed COVID-19 misinformation,’ right? ‘We did wrong when we suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story.’ Because I think these guys are hedging their bets,” Frederick argued.
She warned, “Don't take that victory lap for free speech just because somebody like Mark Zuckerberg says mea culpa to a degree, because we know that in the background, they are continuing to censor apace. We've seen it again and again, not just with Meta actually downranking that photo of Trump raising his fist defiantly in the air [after being shot in July], but we've seen it with Google.” Indeed, likely no company has engaged in more election-interfering censorship than Google.
Frederick highlighted biased search results, “When people tried to search for ‘Trump assassination,’ they weren't getting what happened. They weren’t getting proper search results. Google was not surfacing real information.” MRC studies throughout Octoberand November showed that Google consistently buried right-leaning news sources and websites for major Republican candidates, including Trump, and now Trump’s cabinet picks.
Even Amazon joined in the Big Tech election rigging, Frederick noted, as Alexa was willing to provide reasons for voting for Harris but not for her Republican opponent Trump.
Ultimately, Frederick cautioned that tech oligarchs are “continuing to do what they've always done in election cycles and suppress information. Right now, they're just being a little bit more savvy in the public eye about it, because they know there was such a backlash, given what they did in the 2020 election cycle. I'm telling everyone, they are smart. Don't fall for it guys. All of the censorship is happening in the background.”
And, as The Heritage Foundation is warning, that censorship continues after the election too, no matter what Pichai, Zuckerberg or even Bezos pretend.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact Googleand Facebook here 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 using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
