The American public is told that “censorship” isn’t a thing. We are told that there are no voter suppression efforts or funny business happening on our beloved social media platforms. We are told that these social networks are just upholding their Terms of Service and that these “fact checkers” are helping redirect the masses to more “authoritative” news resources.
And then we learn that executives from Silicon Valley donated money, serious money to Joe Biden’s campaign. According to a Fox News analysis, “tens of thousands of dollars” were donated to Joe Biden’s campaign. (It goes without saying that not a cent was donated to President Trump’s campaign, so we at least know that big tech isn’t somehow paid off by Republicans.) But the fact that the donations allegedly exceed a “legal maximum”, or that there were large donations made by these individuals at all, should be concerning. The fact that all of these funds went to the campaign of a Democratic nominee should also raise eyebrows. Perhaps it will help people connect the dots as to why certain content on your Facebook or Twitter feed either gets removed or shadowbanned.
The New York Post situation, for example, smells oddly of election interference to those of us who believe that the links to the report should never have been banned from social platforms like Facebook and Twitter. This happened just weeks before the election, and maybe — just maybe — some people would have liked to read the story before they casted their votes?
Remember, none of this content suppression occurred when people were carrying on about Trump’s taxes. While many debate whether the release of his taxes was even legal, social media users didn’t exactly show POTUS mercy as his taxes circulated the web — without fact checkers to come to the rescue and clarify details, of course.
These obvious political bias side by side with these donation findings does not look good for these executives who just underwent Senate hearings and took a public lashing over Zoom calls about what appears to most of us as censorship. From suppressing the Hunter Biden story, to haphazard factchecking, to throwing “election awareness stickers” on every post having to do with President Trump, it makes one wonder whether these behaviors came with a price tag attached.
And what if that is true? Breitbart reports that Biden’s transition team will include “Silicon Valley insiders” and a top Google executive being appointed to a White House task force. So is all of this transactional?
It’s time these Big Tech entities are made accountable for going rouge on free speech. Our First Amendment rights should not be lost on a couple of platforms that pretend to give users what they want — a place that actually embraces the free exchange of information.
Sources:
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/facebook-twitter-biden-campaign-donations-censorship
