We’ve been hearing Mark Zuckerberg claim for months that Facebook isn’t biased against conservatives, even as the number of conservative users and media outlets that are banned from Facebook has been rising. The “reason” is always that they’ve violated Facebook’s terms of service or were circulating “fake” or “misleading” political news (which should have gotten CNN banned for life) or vaguely-defined “hate speech,” but the details are usually fuzzy or amount to maybe one story that got something wrong and was already corrected (again, how many times does CNN do that?)
Some conservative media leaders have begun sounding alarms that this is not a coincidence, but part of a concerted effort to silence non-leftist voices; that having encouraged everyone to move away from independent websites and blogs to giant social media sites, the ultra-liberal curators of those sites are now systematically weeding out conservative voices.
https://www.westernjournal.com/exclusive-truth-facebooks-censorship-ny-times-hit-job/
Those critics got new ammunition in the past week or so, and a spotlight was shone on the tech lefties, when Facebook suddenly banned 559 pages.
https://www.westernjournal.com/facebook-purge-list-pages-deleted/
These include the popular site Right Wing News. It’s run by a US military veteran who lost both legs and his right hand in combat in the Middle East. Facebook let him pay them $300,000 for advertising, then not only shut down his page with no warning, they also shut down his business page, Military Grade Coffee, which simply sells coffee and donates a portion of the profits to veterans.
The top executives of social media sites deny any political bias, it’s just those pesky algorithms. But maybe the problem is a little lower than the top. At the link is Tucker Carlson's interview with an engineer who quit Facebook after complaining about the repressive PC corporate culture. He says that despite denials from the top, there is a cabal of engineers in lower management that will attack anyone who expresses a non-far-left thought as “a sexist or a racist or a transphobe or an Islamophobe.” He claims that they are targeting conservative pages in defiance of the site’s mission to promote free speech, and that they are “unbelievably belligerent, demanding and hostile not just toward other employees, but toward Facebook leadership directly."
In other words, it sounds as if the top management at Facebook (as well as Twitter and Google) need to clean out their own houses. If these engineers actually have any talents beyond censoring people they disagree with, then it shouldn’t be hard for them to find new jobs. They can thank President Trump for that.
It hasn’t been a good PR month for Google. There have been reports of the tech giant (former motto: “Don’t be evil”) developing a censorable, traceable search engine for the Chinese government…
https://www.westernjournal.com/google-confirms-creation-dragonfly-censoring-search-engine/
…The exposure of the data of half a million users and an attempt to cover it up…
https://www.westernjournal.com/google-exposed-data-tried-cover/
…A study by the media technology group AllSides that found that despite Google’s denials of bias, the Google News home page and search results show a “strong preference” for left-leaning media sources…
And to put the cherry on top, Google’s female former PR chief has written a satirical book revealing that the Silicon Valley tech industry culture is filled with people who are stridently PC in their attitudes toward everyone else, but incredibly spoiled, sexist and privileged within their own smug bubbles…
Now, just what Google needs to cement its reputation with Americans: while they are eager to work with the communist Chinese government, Google just pulled out of bidding for a $10 billion contract with the Pentagon after some employees quit in protest that it violated their corporate principles.
At this point, I’m sure many Americans will mostly be shocked to hear that Google has principles. Meanwhile, in a totally unrelated story, I’m sure, DuckDuckGo, the search engine that doesn’t track you or keep records of your searches, just hit a record 30 million daily searches, up 50% in just one year.
https://www.cnet.com/news/duckduckgo-hits-30m-daily-searches-as-more-people-flock-toward-privacy
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