Corinne Weaver
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It’s hard to paint a positive picture of big tech companies, especially when it becomes apparent that they are manipulating users. On September 19, The Creepy Line, a documentary on Facebook and Google, will premiere in Washington D.C. “Facebook and Google started with a great idea and great ideals,” said journalist Peter Schweizer in his film.
Pro-life advertisements on Twitter are censored immediately. But ads for female genital mutilation? Those got approved. The Dawoodi Bohra Women for Religious Freedom posted a tweet on September 9 promoting khafz, or female circumcision. This tweet was allowed by Twitter Ads to become a sponsored tweet, popping up in people’s feeds randomly.
After a week of leaked Google emails and videos implying that Google may have tried to influence the 2016 election, it’s time for some answers. Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) told head of Family Research Council Tony Perkins on his Washington Watch radio show that it was time for Google to “come into a hearing.”
Even though Twitter apparently promotes “healthy conversation,” conservatives who work there are afraid to express their opinions. In an interview on NYU liberal journalism Professor Jay Rosen’s podcast, posted on Recode, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey explained how he felt about where Twitter stood politically as a platform.
It just got a lot harder to believe that Google doesn’t have any bias against conservatives. After Tucker Carlson released a leaked email from a Google director saying that the company tried to influence Latino voters, Breitbart released a video of Google execs talking to a large audience of employees the day after the election. Google co-founder Sergey Brin told the company that he was “deeply offended” by the results of the election, which “conflicted with many of the company’s values.”
The media don’t care about online censorship -- unless it happens to them. The liberal site ThinkProgress cried foul after it was fact checked for a story it posted on Facebook involving Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. The original article said Kavanaugh would “kill Roe v. Wade.” Not only was ThinkProgress fact checked, but the article was fact checked by the conservative Weekly Standard.
After a bombshell report was dropped by Tucker Carlson and Breitbart about Google using its influence in the 2016 elections, conservatives have major concerns.
In 2016, some at Google allegedly realized that it had “political power” and tried to flex it against President Trump.
Google’s approach to hate speech is heavy-handed to say the least.
Apparently questioning someone’s intelligence counts as hate speech.
In an unsurprising reversal, Twitter decided to ban conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and InfoWars from its platform as of Sept. 6.
Big tech companies have been trying to say that they don’t favor one political ideology over another. But their users don’t agree.
Denial might be a river in Egypt but today it looked an awful lot like the Potomac.
It’s worth asking big tech companies whether they practice core American values on a global scale. In the Sept. 5, Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on social media, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) asked Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg whether their respective companies were built on “the tenet of freedom of expression.”
Wouldn’t it be nice if Twitter allowed people to see posts from everyone they followed in the order that things were posted?
Twitter jumps on conservative content at the first opportunity. But how long does it take for the platform to remove actual threatening posts? If the target is conservative, the answer is too long.
A new study about Google News shows that while everyone gets the same results, five liberal news organizations “alone” made up 49 percent of the total recommendations from the respective experiments. The five were The New York Times, CNN, Politico, The Washington Post and HuffPost.
Public officials are still calling into question the practices of social media tech companies. Both Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey are set to testify in front of both the House and Senate next week, on September 5. The Senate Intelligence Committee said their hearing was focused on “social media companies’ responses to foreign influence operations.”
While Facebook rushes to focus on hate speech in the United States, apparently it hasn’t analyzed accounts from war-torn places like Myanmar.
Google isn’t the only big tech company with internal issues.