It’s not news that Big Tech has consistently displayed a troubling anti-conservative bias.
This does not make it any less concerning that there is an undeniable trend of accusations against Google, Facebook, and Twitter for practices that appear to be deliberately employed to suppress the views of anyone that can even be vaguely characterized as right wing.
Now, for a random private company to use the platform they’ve created to suppress certain viewpoints is one thing.
The Tech Giants of Silicon Valley, however, are not random companies. They have a vast amount of power over the flow of information and the functional expression of free speech in this country.
So the fact that their biases are so consistent, so clear, and so pervasive absolutely must be addressed.
Just the News reports that Google is facing new accusations of anti-conservative censorship of video content as well as pushing conservative-leaning news websites lower in the search results as compared to left-leaning sources.
Just the News explains of the alleged censorship on Google-owned YouTube:
On Tuesday, the Job Creators Network (JCN), an advocacy group of business leaders, criticized YouTube for what JCN said was unfair censorship of a JCN video by blocking direct access to the video with an “inappropriate content” warning label. The video shows footage of scenes from recent rioting, looting and violence nationwide and asks, “Is your city next?”
An “inappropriate content” label does not prohibit the video from being viewed, but users must log in and click that they “understand and wish to proceed” before viewing. JCN claimed that the warning prevents videos from being promoted, reducing reach and view count.
“YouTube’s decision to slap an inappropriate content restriction on our video depicting news footage of rioting shows Google’s left-wing bias,” Alfredo Ortiz, JCN president and CEO, said in a Tuesday press statement. “It amounts to censorship of opposing political opinions. YouTube does not treat left-wing videos that depict violent protests with similar warnings that depress view count and reach. YouTube and other social media platforms are this century’s ‘town square,’ and they should not censor based on political viewpoints. They should uphold the values of free speech that are the basis of their revenue model and popularity. Social media’s widespread censorship of conservative views demonstrates society’s slide away from the values of free speech. President Trump should nominate a strong defender of the First Amendment to the Supreme Court to help reestablish this fundamental right of all Americans.”
The claim that Google is suppressing search results from right-wing news websites is far from conjecture; if you’ve ever searched any major news story in Google, you will know first-hand you’d be hard-pressed to find a conservative site in the top results.
Top outlets like Breitbart, The Daily Caller, and The Federalist “have seen their Google search listings dramatically reduced” by Google, according to Stossel TV executive producer Maxim Lott.
He analyzed data from Sistrix, an SEO firm that tracks a million search keywords used on Google, to draw this conclusion.
“The tracker shows that Google search visibility for Breitbart first plunged in 2017, before falling to approximately zero in July 2019,” Lott wrote at RealClearPolitics. He explained that both Breitbart and The Daily Caller confirmed that their traffic from Google had sharply declined as their search rankings fell.
“People have long worried that Google would censor conservative news results, or any results they don’t like,” Lott told Just the News in a video interview.
“There hasn’t been much evidence until now, where basically you can look at a graph of how well websites are doing on Google search results, how highly they’re ranked, and conservative websites like the Daily Caller, Breitbart, they’ve just been zeroed out. Google’s basically not going to show them to you. It’s more sites too, like the Spectator US. And their reach has gone to basically zero. And there’s almost no other explanation than that they’ve been deemed unreliable by people at Google.”
Google, according to Lott, controls nearly 90% of U.S. Internet search traffic. If you are thinking they have the potential to have a dramatic effect on the outcome of a U.S. election, you’re not alone.
According to a 2015 peer-reviewed study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a search engine could influence over 10% of undecided voters in an election simply by manipulating search results.
This election is the most important of our lifetime. Between social media censorship and mail-in voting schemes, there’s also never been more cause for concern about the integrity of our election.
This is not just a face-off between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. This is a face-off between the future of free speech and progressive tyranny and the Tech Giants have clearly chosen their side.
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