The debate over online content access promises get even more intense as the 2020 election gets closer and closer. Setting aside fringe actors, it often seems to come down to legitimate free speech vs. Orwellian censorship.
Big Tech continues to de-platform peaceful, right-leaning individuals and websites under vague or unexplained terms of service violations while permitting most leftists to run wild.
Unlike they way they classify conservative news outlets, social media networks also have never deemed legacy liberal publishers as unreliable, despite all the misinformation and disinformation, particularly of an anti-Trump variety, that they’ve “reported (see below).
Republicans from President Trump on down, including Sens. Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, and the president’s savvy 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale, have denounced online political bias. Last year, reports emerged that the White House was drafting an executive order to address such bias. Since them, however, as Trump himself might say, all talk, and no action. This even includes the White House-launched website/online complaint department to gather information from those who believe they have been subjected to online political bias.
That nothing legislatively substantive has happened to date be the result of Silicon Valley pumping cash into “Conservative, Inc.,” i.e., all the influential Beltway think tanks and similar organizations? And are those think tanks, who put the “con” in conservative, in turn, lobbying the Trump administration and Congress against implementing any free-speech protections?
Nonprofits Profiting Off of Big Tech
Last night, Tucker Carlson delivered a strong editorial on the subject of Conservative, Inc. selling out, in which he said, in part…
“We’ve told you a lot on this show in the past few years about how Google, Facebook, and Twitter work in secret to impose a left-wing political agenda on this country…no one in Washington is doing anything to rein these companies in. But it doesn’t have to be this way. There are a lot of things you could do if you wanted to…a big part of the problem is that conservative nonprofits here in Washington, the ones that are supposed to be looking out for you, aren’t actually looking out for you. They’re looking out for Big Tech. A new report from the Campaign for Accountability, obtained by this show, highlights how conservative organizations in D.C. have colluded with Big Tech to shield left-wing monopolies from any oversight at all…Google has given money to at least 20 right-leaning institutions that are also funded by the Koch network…Big Tech companies silence conservatives–conservative nonprofits try to prevent the government from doing anything about it…they make deals with people who hate you, they secretly sell out your interests, then they beg you to tithe like it’s the medieval church…maybe that’s why no matter how much money you send, nothing gets more conservative. Just the opposite.”
Parenthetically, despite this collusion, the left, including the blue-check Twitter SJW brigade, hates the Never Trump billionaire libertarian Koch Brothers (and they disgustingly celebrating when one of them recently passed away). Their stenographers in the media hardly ever focus on the disruptive meddling in America and in Europe by billionaire, open-borders leftist George Soros, including installing soft-on-crime prosecutors in various U.S. jurisdictions.
“Evidence of big tech’s efforts to co-opt establishment conservatives has been accumulating for some time. In March, Breitbart News published leaked audio from a senior director of public policy at Google, talking about using funding of conservative institutions to ‘steer’ the movement,” Breitbart News recalled.
In the name of “free markets,” Conservative, Inc., among others across the Democrat-Republican political spectrum (sometimes known as the UniParty), stood by while China destroyed American’s manufacturing base and sent millions to the unemployment line.
Conservative Groups in the Swamp
Earlier this week, Ned Ryun published a superb essay about Conservative, Inc. at the American Greatness website entitled “The Toxic Swamp Gas Polluting the American Right.”
“It ’s about time we had a conversation about the racket in D.C., though it’s probably not the one that springs first to mind. I’m talking about Conservatism Inc.—that ecosystem of mostly worthless and ineffective think tanks and conservative organizations that are part and parcel of the swamp. They came riding into town, some decades ago, all gung-ho about breaking up the administrative state and restoring constitutional government and now, lo and behold, discovered that the swamp could start to feel like a warm, soothing hot tub.
“By any metric with which you could measure effectiveness (simply existing doesn’t count) can anyone really tell you why Conservatism, Inc. even exists? A back of the napkin estimate shows that every year, hundreds and hundreds of millions fund these entities, but to what end?
Certainly not to be effective. Over the last 30-40 years, in the supposed heyday of the conservative movement, the size of government has exploded; our national debt has risen from roughly $1 trillion to nearly $23 trillion…
“They build swanky office buildings with marble lined bathrooms, employ French chefs, give themselves expense budgets, including even personal drivers, and generally live very comfortable lives, and then sell BS lines to their donors about how they’re changing the world, saving America, and blah blah blah.
“They are living in an alternate reality: the supposed wise men of the movement aren’t saving anything except their sinecures; they’ve presided over a rapid decay in this country. But damn if they haven’t had the best seats on the Titanic…
“Instead, these organizations have become fun-house mirror reflections of the bureaucracy they said they were coming to destroy. The supposed leaders and champions of the conservative movement in D.C.? Well, let’s just say they’ve become conservative welfare queens, giving themselves healthy six-figure, even seven-figure salaries—culled from charitable donations, mind you—while hardly moving the needle. You could even make the argument that they act like kept women: they apparently will do anything for their donors as long as they are kept in comfort and living according to the lifestyle they expect…
“Instead of being even slightly effective, Conservatism, Inc.—to satisfy big corporate donors—has been detrimental to the movement and the entire country with it…. More than a few within Conservatism, Inc. have even become tech collaborators, accepting direct contributions from the Googles and Facebooks of the world to then turn around and mouth pretty little platitudes about ‘free market forces’ and capitalism and private companies. Never mind that these monopolies undermine the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, free speech, and fair elections or that these people claim to be the defenders of precisely these things. But do tell me more about freedom and all that… will someone please explain to me why it still exists? Because if it merely exists to pimp out the ideas of Big Tech and pharma and vulture capitalists, the entire thing should be burned to the ground.”
Algorithm Manipulation and Blacklists
In a thorough, long-form investigative piece about Google published last month called “How Google Interferes With Its Search Algorithms and Changes Your Results,” the Wall Street Journal found the following:
” • Google made algorithmic changes to its search results that favor big businesses over smaller ones…
“• Google engineers regularly make behind-the-scenes adjustments to other information the company is increasingly layering on top of its basic search results….
“Despite publicly denying doing so, Google keeps blacklists to remove certain sites or prevent others from surfacing in certain types of results…
“In auto-complete, the feature that predicts search terms as the user types a query, Google’s engineers have created algorithms and blacklists to weed out more-incendiary suggestions for controversial subjects…”
Related story: Holistic Health and Online Search
The WSJ (which may be part of the Conservative, Inc., cohort) somewhat tap dances around the issue of political bias, but adds the following:
“Interest groups from the right and left have besieged Google with questions about content displayed in search results and about why the company’s algorithms returned certain information over others…
“The practice of creating blacklists for certain types of sites or searches has fueled cries of political bias from some Google engineers and right-wing publications that said they have viewed portions of the blacklists. Some of the websites Google appears to have targeted in Google News were conservative sites and blogs, according to documents reviewed by the Journal. In one partial blacklist reviewed by the Journal, some conservative and right-wing websites, including The Gateway Pundit and The United West, were included on a list of hundreds of websites that wouldn’t appear in news or featured products, although they could appear in organic search results. Google has said repeatedly it doesn’t make decisions based on politics, and current and former employees told the Journal they haven’t seen evidence of political bias. ”
As alluded to above, from The Federalist, here is a summary of a dozen stories the mainstream media, an arm of the Democrat Party which is loved by Big Tech, got “horribly” wrong in 2019:
Last year, Harvard historian Niall Ferguson predicted that “Silicon Valley is never going to let 2016 happen again.” He was referring to Donald Trump’s social-media-enabled surprise victory — at least to the political establishment and pollsters — over Hillary Clinton in the presidential election.
Added: The Heritage Foundation, though its VP of Communications Robert Bluey, responded to the Tucker Carlson segment, American Greatness separately noted.
[Featured image credit: Gerd Altmann/Pixabay]Bluey claimed that Heritage’s paper about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which Tucker singled out for its close resemblance to Big Tech talking points, was not based on a tech lobby’s paper because it contained footnotes. Section 230 is a prized treasure to tech platforms because it protects them from publisher liabilities. One reason tech platforms are granted this privilege is out of the assumption they operate a neutral political forums. Heritage supports this protection, even though tech giants abuse it with their censorship and bias against conservatives. The reason: ‘Heritage supports empowering consumers rather than government.'”
