CNN's Oliver Darcy was responding to this tweet in his article attacking Trump for painting "tech giants like Facebook and Twitter as villains in a longstanding culture war used to excite the conservative base." Tellingly, his article did not once mention Facebook silencing conservative articles based on the premise they "look like spam," which took place the day before Trump's tweet.
CNN rushed to "debunk" the claims of Google's bias against conservatives, without mentioning the many lawsuits against Google! James Damore, the former senior software engineer who was fired after spreading a document asking questions about the tech gender gap, is suing Google for discrimination against conservatives. Prager University is suing Google and YouTube for discrimination against conservative content. YouTube continues to restrict access to PragerU videos.
Facebook recently "shadow banned" PragerU, preventing at least nine PragerU Facebook posts from reaching any of their 3 million followers. For good measure, Facebook also deleted some of their videos.
A survey early this year found that conservative employees in Silicon Valley tech companies live in fear that their political beliefs would be found out. James Damore said conservatives at Google are "in the closet" and that Google executives are digging through a secret mailing list in order to out them.
Tech companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Twitter have relied on the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a far-left smear factory that brands conservative and Christian organizations "hate groups," listing them along with the Ku Klux Klan. In June, the SPLC had to pay $3.375 million to settle a defamation lawsuit against a Muslim reformer. About 60 organizations are considering separate defamation lawsuits against the group.
Amazon.com has excluded SPLC-designated "hate groups" from its charity program, Amazon Smile. The company exiled D. James Kennedy Ministries and Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a Christian legal nonprofit that has won 9 Supreme Court cases in seven years. D. James Kennedy Ministries is suing Amazon and the SPLC over this action.
More recently, the SPLC-designated "hate group" Jihad Watch and its founder Robert Spencer were de-platformed by Patreon, and then the crowdfunding site GoFundMe effectively stole thousands from Spencer.
Oftentimes, social media companies like Facebook and Twitter will temporarily ban conservatives for "hate speech," when the posts in question did not violate their safety standards. Christian scholar Robert Gagnon has been repeatedly suspended on Facebook, and in April the social media platform suspended a German history professor for saying that "Islam is not a part of German history."
Like the SPLC's "hate group" labels, these "hate speech" bans target conservatives, not liberals. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has "fully" admitted that "our bias is more left-leaning." Is it really that much of a conspiracy theory — considering the lawsuits, the partnership with the SPLC, and the many isolated instances of conservatives finding themselves singled out — to suggest that tech companies have systematically targeted conservatives?
All this context and more gives important weight to Trump's claims that Google is biased against conservatives. Rather than address the mainstream conservatives attacked in these isolated incidents, however, mainstream media reporters continue to cite the bans on InfoWars as if they were the main issue.
Cunningly, Darcy ignored the de-platforming of Jihad Watch and the silencing of conservative articles as "spam." He wrote, "It was unclear what precisely the President's Friday tweet was referencing, but it came just weeks after Facebook, YouTube, and Apple removed content from far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his fringe media organization InfoWars from their platforms."
Neither Trump's tweet last week nor his tweets Tuesday morning were about InfoWars. By mentioning InfoWars, however, Darcy associated the "conspiracy theory" of tech anti-conservative bias with a truly conspiratorial website.
PragerU, James Damore, Salena Zito, Jihad Watch, D. James Kennedy Ministries, and Alliance Defending Freedom are not InfoWars. Their experiences are real, and pending litigation against Google cannot be ignored in the discussion of whether or not Trump's tweets support a "conspiracy theory."
No comments:
Post a Comment