Social media being targeted by Trump White House for anti conservative bias

Epoch Times:

Vice President Mike Pence says that the Trump administration is strongly opposed to censorship of conservatives by social media and big tech companies, and that suppression of conservative voices ahead of the November general election will be met with a response from the White House.

“Well, the president has made it very clear that we are not going to tolerate censorship on the internet and social media against conservatives,” Pence told Breitbart in an exclusive interview on May 22. “We’re just not going to tolerate it.”

The vice president didn’t provide details regarding what form the administration’s response might take, but The Wall Street Journal, citing “people familiar with the matter,” reported over the weekend that the White House is considering the creation of a commission that would evaluate claims of anti-conservative bias.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly voiced concern over alleged suppression of conservatives by big tech and social media companies. In a May 16 tweet, the president accused several popular platforms of serving the “radical left” and hinted at a White House-led remedy.

“The Radical Left is in total command & control of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Google,” Trump wrote in the tweet, adding that the administration is “working to remedy this illegal situation.”
...

Conservatives have long argued that big tech and social media platforms suppress right-leaning voices through politically motivated content moderation, selective fact-checking, skewing search rankings, and manipulating news feeds.

Radio talk show host Dennis Prager several years ago sued Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google and YouTube, claiming that YouTube’s “animus” toward his “political identity and viewpoint” led it to curb access to videos, including through its “Restricted Mode” setting, on such topics as abortion, gun rights, Islam, and terrorism, despite its stated promise of neutrality.

Alphabet later won the dismissal of the lawsuit, with the judge saying Google and YouTube didn’t qualify as “state actors” subject to the First Amendment by creating a “public forum” for speech.
...

But many conservatives hold that the standards for determining what is “misleading” are insufficiently transparent and prone to politically-motivated tilt.

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki announced a policy on April 22 that “anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations would be a violation of our policy,” and that it would be “removing information that is problematic.”

The regime in China was recently accused by Trump’s national security adviser of intentionally giving “false information” to the World Health Organization, and the president has warned of permanent cuts to the agency’s funding.
...

Mark Grabowski, an associate professor specializing in cyber law and digital ethics at Adelphi University, told The Epoch Times there’s a double standard when it comes to online speech, in particular with COVID-19 related topics.

“In some cases, the [virus] content was produced by authoritative sources like physicians, professors, and epidemiologists,” he said. “Meanwhile, these same platforms are promoting highly speculative opinions by people who are completely unqualified to speak on the topic.”

At last year’s White House-hosted social media summit, conservative critics denounced a range of alleged practices by big tech companies, with Trump weighing in with allegations of unfair treatment.

“We have terrible bias. We have censorship like no one has any understanding, nobody can believe,” Trump said at the event. “They’re playing with a lot of minds and they’re playing unfairly.”
...

The administration should consider suing these companies under the anti-trust laws for monopolizing political speech.  What they are doing is unfair and it represent s a political donation to the evils of liberalism and the Democrats.