Censorship
Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) roasted Google’s representative at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. The hearing, “Google and Censorship through Search Engines,” featured numerous heavy hitters from both sides of the political aisle bludgeoning the platform. When Google’s Vice President of Public Policy Karan Bhatia said that censoring conservatives would be inconsistent with Google’s values, Hawley quipped “Except for when you do it in China, right?”
A July 15 Facebook post from Webster complained that Sheriff Ed Gonzalez does nothing about the “criminal illegal immigrants” that inhabit Harris County, Texas. Shortly after posting, Gonzalez came out with a Tweet saying he “just got suspended from Facebook for seven days.”
MSNBC host Chris Hayes devoted a two minute-long monologue to trashing President Trump’s social media summit on Thursday’s edition of All In. According to Hayes, “instead of social media companies like Twitter and Facebook, they invited a pack of Trump-supporting, race-baiting conspiracy theorists.” Hayes also described the event as an “ice cream social for trolls.”
The big tech censorship of conservative content and influencers across all social media platforms has raised questions about the impact the internet has on restricting free speech. To discuss the silencing of ideas that dissent from social media companies’ liberal worldviews, President Trump held a social media summit with prominent names in the conservative movement at the White House on Thursday afternoon. And surprise, surprise, talk show host Jimmy Kimmel let it be known he was unimpressed.
On Thursday's MSNBC Live host Ali Velshi was joined by NBC reporter Ben Collins and Syracuse Professor Jennifer Grygiel to talk about the social media summit President Trump had at the White House. The trio said that not only do conservatives have nothing to complain about when it comes to social media bias, but that the particular attendees had benefited from social media, and that the meeting had ulterior motives.
The First Amendment to our Constitution was proposed by the 1788 Virginia ratification convention during its narrow 89 to 79 vote to ratify the Constitution. Virginia's resolution held that the free exercise of religion, right to assembly and free speech could not be canceled, abridged or restrained. These Madisonian principles were eventually ratified by the states on March 1, 1792.
The Thursday Social Media Summit at the White House will rally supporters of free speech. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), who plans to attend the summit, has commented that he is “concerned there are people who work at the major technology platforms who want to put their thumb on the scale.” “All we want is a fair fight,” said Gaetz. “I guess in a sense if highlighting experiences and instances of bias will result in fewer moderations that present as bias, all the better.”
In a press release on July 8, Instagram announced a new content policy designed to stop “hate speech.” Users will be warned when they post a comment or an update that might be considered “offensive.” An algorithm would monitor content before posting
To any student of history, or anyone who ever took an American history class, the idea that the American flag with 13 stars was a symbol of racism and slavery was nonsense. But CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News bought into the accusation without even a second thought and even pushed the lunacy.
The Washington Post doesn’t like President Trump, and it really doesn’t like his tweets. So it’s hardly surprising the Post’s editorial board would love a new Twitter policy that potentially could silence -- or at least quiet -- Trump’s account. A June 29 editorial recalls last year when Trump tweeted about the firing of former aide Omarosa Manigault Newman and called her a “lowlife.”
Eric Cochran worked at Pinterest for nearly two years, creating open-source code for a variety of apps. But with a June 24 op-ed in Newsweek, he’s exposing the censorship skeletons in the platform’s closet. Cochran says he was an idealist who “wanted to do good” with the technology he created. “I thought Pinterest could be different from its sibling tech giants. I hoped Pinterest might be a tech company that respected its users and was honest with them.”
On Monday morning, New Day aired a portion of an interview between CNN Newsroom anchor Poppy Harlow and Google’s CEO Sundar Pinchai. They discussed everything from China to data privacy, but Harlow seemed intent to focus on YouTube’s policies on “hate speech.”