By that standard, it should be apparent to most Americans that Silicon Valley’s tech giants intend to collude to tilt this election in Joe Biden’s favor.
Years of generalized bias and the ever-tightening “terms of service” that each of the major tech industry power players have adopted over the past four years have profoundly changed the internet as we knew it and dramatically restricted the scope of free speech and debate in our society as a whole. Anyone with a shred of personal honesty knows that social media, online comment sections and the internet as a whole are unrecognizable from the environment that existed in 2015 and 2016—the one that helped secure Donald Trump’s historic victory despite the opposition of just about every major institution in the United States.
The less informed—or, more likely, the beneficiaries of censorship—might argue that this was the result of something other than the deliberate policy of companies such as Google. Never mind that those same companies held tear-filled coping sessions the day after Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, at which executives told employees that Trump’s victory was “deeply offensive” and a mere “hiccup,” in response to which they would simply have to “use…great strength and resources and reach…to continue to advance really important values.”
The notion that tech censorship is inadvertent, however, is impossible to maintain when one considers Google, Facebook and Twitter’s actions, especially as the 2020 presidential campaign moves into its critical phase.
Facebook, the largest social media platform in the world and the window through which millions of Americans get their news and express their opinions, long ago began appointing panels of liberals and left-wingers to police its users. In 2020, that policy went into overdrive, an obvious attempt to place the Trump campaign at a messaging disadvantage so that Joe Biden’s pliant gang of mainstream journalists can have full control over the national media narrative.
If Facebook were trying to assemble a team to get Joe Biden elected, it could not have selected a better group of censors. The star of Facebook’s election season “oversight board” is Pamela Karlan, the Stanford law professor who tried and failed to have Donald Trump removed from office with hours of angry, ranting testimony before the United States Senate. Karlan’s panel was first proposed by another of the pro-removal Senate witnesses and also includes a liberal former Danish prime minister, a “human rights expert” from the Open Society network, and a former Guardian editor-in-chief who publicly cheered for President Trump’s impeachment.
That, however, isn’t the only panel Facebook is employing against the Trump campaign. The social media giant has also hired a firm run by former CNN reporters and Democratic Party donors to “fake check” news on its platform.
The results of these efforts are already easy to see. Facebook is banning a Trump campaign ad that denounced violent Antifa rioters because it included a symbol used by that group—allegedly because an upside-down triangle is a “Nazi symbol.”
Twitter’s long-running enlistment of left-wing censors is also paying election season dividends, labeling the president’s tweets against violent rioters as “glorifying violence” and his memes as “manipulated media.”
In laying the groundwork for a slanted internet, however, nothing Facebook nor Twitter do on their platforms compares with Google, the most powerful corporation in the world. While Google’s censorship on its own platforms, such as YouTube, is troubling enough, it’s even more worrisome that the search empire has the power to tilt elections in a way mere platforms cannot. They can quickly and easily choke off pro-Trump voices from the traffic and ad revenue needed to reach supporters.
We saw the genesis of Google’s election season strategy last week, when the company demonetized two conservatives sites, Zero Hedge and The Federalist. The more mainstream of the two sites, The Federalist, only managed to get its lifeblood back by agreeing to delete its entire comments section.
Worse than the decision itself was how and why it was made: it was in response to demands from NBC News journalists that their competitors be punished. An NBC News reporter even had the gall to thank a British far-left group for its “collaboration” in getting The Federalist cut off from ad revenue. When it was all done, other liberal journalists celebrated the win, bragging about The Federalist “bending the knee” by deleting comments.
By now, the pattern should be clear. Joe Biden’s allies in Silicon Valley and mainstream media newsrooms are doing everything they can to make the internet an inhospitable environment for Trump supporters during the sprint to Election Day. With every turn of the censorship ratchet, it becomes more difficult for Trump’s message to reach its audience and easier for Biden’s messaging to go unchallenged. Trump will overcome this disadvantage, but Big Tech companies are giving it everything they’ve got to try to defeat him.
Ironically, the tech giants claim to support free and open discourse. Their actions, however, reveal the emptiness of those words.
Charlie Kirk is the founder and executive director of Turning Point Action, an advocacy group for young conservatives.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
