Corinne Weaver
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It should come as no surprise that a “voting company” that partnered with social media companies in 2018 failed to help voters register as advertised. Facebook and Twitter touted TurboVote as a voting reminder and an aid in registering to vote.
Twitter claims to be against “hate speech” and for “healthy conversation.” But the amount of anti-Semitic material allowed on its platform tells a different story.
The case against social media platforms and their consistent censorship of conservative content is growing rapidly. In a new op-ed by Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son slammed Facebook, Instagram, and Google for their latest mistakes in removing and downranking posts made by the right.
Former Vice President Joe Biden is taking his sweet time in deciding if he’s going to run for President in 2020. But a look at his plans might determine the answer anyway. CNBC interviewed an anonymous source from Twitter who said Obama’s Vice President was receiving advice from an unnamed Twitter executive.
In a troubling new video released by James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas, a former Facebook employee detailed the alleged suppression of conservative content on the social media platform. Facebook has denied the allegations. The anonymous insider, who was fired by Facebook in 2018, said she had seen “things that were going on that I personally found to be troubling.”
Financial processors who ban websites and businesses based on political ideology practice another, more insidious form of social media censorship. If blog or account depends on donations or sales of merchandise, it is vulnerable to being starved of revenue. Unfortunately, the processors aren’t necessarily reliably informed when they make such decisions.
Silicon Valley has already sunk its claws into the 2020 election. Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) is running for president, along with many other Democrats. But he may have an advantage that the others don’t in connections with Silicon Valley.
Twitter has claimed in the past that it does not discriminate against conservatives. That’s just not true. In the past five years, there have been at least 113 different cases of conservative, pro-Trump or anti-establishment figures on Twitter being punished for expressing their views, many of them well-known in their fields.
Some of the motivating forces behind the 2020 elections could prove to be sinister for the First Amendment and media outlets the left hates. The founder of Data for Progress, a far-left think tank that endorses socialism and the Green New Deal, wants the next Democrat president to silence Fox News. He shared a study done by two Columbia University researchers that claimed judges who watched Fox delivered harsher criminal sentences based on racial motivation.
Facebook is willing to take down pages funded by Russia. Now it’s facing the question about what to do about other state-funded media outlets like Al Jazeera, BBC and even NPR? Facebook suspended three pages on February 15 , including the popular video site Ruptly. All three allegedly failed to disclose that they were backed by RT, which is funded by the Russian government.
Google is engaged in partisan warfare. And it picked the liberal side, choosing to work with two of the most prominent liberal outlets in the U.S. — The New York Times and Washington Post. The company detailed its efforts to fight “misinformation” at the Munich Security Conference on February 16. Google boasted that users trust the information they find on Google Search, and that information “comes from the reporting of journalists,” One of the solutions to fight “misinformation” was the Google News Initiative, which supports “quality journalism.”
Foreign governments are preparing to crack down on social media monopolies. An English House of Commons committee, the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, released a report claiming Facebook’s flaws were “risking the U.K.’s democracy.”
Successful businesses boost the economy of the state. But should they be forced to share their profits with the state? California Governor Gavin Newsom seems to think so. In his “State of the State” speech, given February 13, Newsom noted that California tech companies make billions in profits every year.
Twitter wants to regulate the kind of speech that’s allowed on its platform. But there will be some backlash from those who are banned.
Silicon Valley is full of opportunities for political donations. But a Soros-funded organization wants to make sure any support goes to the correct side of the political spectrum.
Twitter has rescinded and apologized for many of its bans and suspensions of conservative users, calling those decisions “mistakes.” But they might not have been mistakes after all. In an interview with podcaster Sam Harris on February 5, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was grilled about the way “Twitter reliably lands on one side of the political divide.” Harris questioned Dorsey about Twitter’s decision to ban feminist Megan Murphy for tweeting “Men are not women,” while ignoring Rev. Louis Farrakhan’s anti-Semitic tweets
What happens when the front page of the internet is funded by the company that made the Great Firewall in China? Reddit, the internet forum for communities, posts, and news, is currently fundraising to keep itself afloat, with a $300 million goal.
Who knew that sharing a public fact about a liberal politician could count as bullying? GOP spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany tweeted on February 6 that she had been blocked from her Instagram account. It was not until the next day that Instagram noted the mistake it had made, due to public outcry from the Daily Caller and Breitbart, and restored McEnany’s account.
A “bullying bounty? Social media platforms are now going to offer incentives to their employees to follow their company’s political agenda. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced to his company in a phone call in January that the social media platform would be offering bonuses to its employees based on what they have done for social progress
Facebook once decided that partnering with a liberal fact-checker would help stop the spread of supposed “fake news.” On February 1, fact-checking site Snopes announced that it was no longer interested in working with Facebook and was pulling out of its partnership with the social media company.