The censors of Big Tech
The Twitter Files have provided stunning confirmation of a Deep State-Big Tech conspiracy to censor ideas and individuals deemed harmful to their shared ends — from protecting Joe Biden’s candidacy for president to draconian COVID-19 lockdowns — under the pretext of national security or public health.
But Twitter was far from the only platform with the motive and means to purge dissenting voices from establishment orthodoxy. Nor was it the only such platform with a “Trust and Safety” (read: “censorship”) team helmed by former US intelligence officials, which met regularly with their former security-state employers to combat “misinformation” in the run-up to the 2020 election.
Take Facebook. Since 2016, it has embraced a “content moderation” scheme called “Remove, Reduce, Inform” to address “problematic” content.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, as demanded by the Biden administration, Facebook employed the scheme to suppress and counter content violative of the Anthony Fauci party line.
Aaron Berman, Facebook’s misinformation policy chief, described how the company relied on purportedly independent but reliably progressive fact-checkers to flag COVID “misinformation” during an August 2021 Stanford University-convened conference on America’s “INFODEMIC.”
Facebook would remove such content, limit its reach into users’ feeds algorithmically and/or slap warning labels on it featuring links to “authoritative information” in a bid, for example, to combat “vaccine hesitancy” — which would also trigger its algorithm to reduce distribution.
Berman also describes “Minority Report”-like “predictive” AI tools that Facebook leveraged to determine questionable content likely to go viral for targeting.
Facebook removed pages, groups and accounts that repeatedly featured such content.
As with many Twitter officials involved in content-moderation decisions, Berman had been a 17-plus-year employee of the CIA, where among other things he wrote and edited the President’s Daily Brief. Ex-intelligence officials from the CIA, FBI, DHS and beyond fill Facebook’s trust and safety team ranks.
Facebook has applied such tools on myriad other topics, including algorithmically limiting the distribution of The Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story weeks before the 2020 presidential election — flagging posts even from US senators like Republican Chuck Grassley on the doings of John Durham’s Russiagate special counsel and reducing the reach of “hyperposters” who had spread “misinformation” during the 2016 election.
Facebook has even applied flags to certain individuals to diminish content connected with them, such as when the platform labeled Kyle Rittenhouse’s shooting a “mass murder,” and on those grounds, blocked searches of his name and content in “praise or support” of him.
Mark Zuckerberg’s platform has also created a two-tier censorship system known as “XCheck,” under which Facebook had, as of 2020, “whitelisted” some 5.8 million “VIPs” who were not subjected to the same censorship rules mere mortals faced.
Google-owned YouTube has repeatedly censored content and suspended figures up to and including Republican Sens. Ron Johnson and Rand Paul for posting videos on their channels featuring COVID wrongthink.
It has demonetized and limited the reach of videos on subjects from the Ten Commandments to Karl Marx and everywhere in between posted by conservative publishers like PragerU, according to a lawsuit filed by the group.
YouTube terminated thousands of channels covering content of which it disapproved during the 2020 election.
In October 2021, the platform declared it would not allow ads or monetization for content that “contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change.”
Though it denies it targets anyone for politics, evidence suggests Google’s dominant search function reduced in its rankings results from conservative sources such as Breitbart, the Daily Caller and The Federalist, thereby hurting their traffic.
Not even email is immune. The Republican National Committee is suing Google over claims it politically discriminated against it by sending millions of RNC emails to recipients’ spam folders in Gmail — undermining its fundraising and electioneering efforts.
Public records show Google’s trust and safety staff, like that of Twitter and Facebook, is filled with longtime intelligence community officials. Representative among them is Jacqueline Lopour, an ex-CIA analyst who serves as senior manager for intelligence collections, which manages “intel operations” on, among other things, “misinformation” and “hate speech,” according to LinkedIn.
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There is more.
Most of this censorship appears to be directed at those who do not support the Democrat or leftist narratives. It is an attempt to make it harder for opponents of the Democrats to get their message out. Big Tech needs to be held accountable for these abuses of free speech. It should be treated as a common carrier such as a telephone company and not as a censor of media it disagrees with.
See, also:
"Twitter made a decision, via the political leanings of senior staff, and govt pressure, that the public health authorities’ approach to the pandemic – prioritizing mitigation over other concerns – was 'The Science,'" Zweig reports.
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