ANALYSIS/OPINION:
The biggest media story of the year broke last week. Yet, millions of Americans never heard the story because the mainstream media “shadow banned” it.
The story was Project Veritas’ expose’ of Twitter. Undercover operatives filmed Twitter employees admitting bias against conservatives and revealing what conservatives have known for a long time. Twitter shadow bans conservatives.
Shadow banning means that a person can still post on Twitter, but no one sees it. The mainstream media did not cover this story. They were too busy repeating the unsubstantiated allegations that President Trump had referred to certain nations as, shall we say, “sewer holes.”
Project Veritas’ videos prove what conservatives have claimed for a very long time. Big tech is more than just biased against conservatives. Big tech takes direct action to stop conservative points of view.
Accusations of liberal bias in the tech industry are nothing new. Google all but acted as the IT department for the Democrat Party for the last 10 years. Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is a well-known contributor to the Democrat Party. As is Mark Zuckerberg, one of the founders of Facebook.
It is not just a matter of tech overwhelmingly supporting Hillary Clinton and the Party of Treason.
The problem is big tech is trying to kill any other point of view from being heard.
James Damore was an engineer with Google, and he was fired last August. His crime? He pointed out that men and women are different and women may not be as attracted to careers in tech as men.
Damore and another former Google employee are suing the tech giant. In his complaint, Damore alleges and supports with screen shots of internal discussions, an environment of hate against anyone who could be considered a conservative. Threats are made against conservatives. Leftists in the Google hierarchy will not only damage their careers at Google, but will make sure they don’t work in the tech industry at all.
While Google was busy making life miserable for conservatives who worked for it, the search engine giant was also busy trying to fight “fake news.” As a part of that fight, it announced in its search engine results, it would start “fact checking.” Their version of fact checking means that conservative sites have “disclaimers” or reviews. For example, The Washington Times is noted as having a political alignment, “Conservatism in America.” While The Washington Post carries no such notice. Neither does The New York Times, even though both papers are famously liberal.
The Times does fare better than Breitbart.com in the world of Google results. Under Breitbart’s entry, Google has a section called “reviewed claims.” In this tab, Google features left-wing websites that claim to have debunked Breitbart stories.
Matthew and Jennifer Burke are conservative activists who launched a website in 2016 called “The Politistick.” Based on previous experience, they used Facebook to launch their website. At first, the results were not only excellent but were consistent with what they experienced in the past. Then right before the 2016 election, the engagement the website generated from Facebook abruptly fell. According to Jennifer Burke, “The page went from performing great to puttering rather rapidly just before and then after the election. I’m talking performing at 10% of what it had been performing.” Meanwhile, Facebook continued to encourage them to advertise.
Well known conservative blogger John Hawkins recently announced the demise of his long running website Rightwingnews.com. In a column in Townhall.com, he placed the blame squarely on Facebook and other social media giants and their war on conservatives.
Mr. Hawkins noted, “We’ve already lost the schools, Hollywood and the mainstream media. What happens when you can’t get out conservative opinion via social media because they block, shadow ban and demonetize everyone who gets any traction? What happens if they put rules in place that essentially make expressing conservative opinions something that gets you kicked off their service? You’re pro-gun? Sorry, not allowed. You don’t like gay marriage? Get out of here. Criticizing Black Lives Matter? Out of bounds!”
Perhaps the obvious question is, why isn’t the Trump Department of Justice moving to break up the tech giants? In April 2017, according to Net Market Share, Google had 77.43 percent of the global search engine market share. The closed competitor was Baidu at 8.43%.
Never heard of Baidu? It is China’s version of Google.
YouTube, which is a part of Google’s parent company Alphabet, has also been making war on conservatives. Talk show host Dennis Prager is suing YouTube for censoring his videos. While YouTube allows videos that include graphic fights and other violence, videos that talk about conservative ideas are marked as over 18 only and are demonetized, meaning the producer cannot have ads or make revenue off of those videos. Videos by liberals have no such problems.
YouTube dominates the video market. According to Statista.com, in November 2016, YouTube had 78.8% of the multimedia market. Netflix came in next at 8% and the closest real alternative to YouTube, Vimeo, came in at .8% of the market.
Why isn’t the Justice Department launching anti-trust investigations and litigation against big tech?
The free market can only exist with competition and democracy can only exist when there is a free market of ideas and ideas compete. Liberalism is all about crushing the expression of any idea that disagrees with liberal political orthodoxy. Whatever that orthodoxy is on any given day.
As John Hawkins said, “Social media is the new public square.” If big tech is going to exclude conservative voices and ideas from the public square, big tech is now a threat to freedom and liberty.
For the sake of freedom and liberty, the big tech companies must be broken up.
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