Social media conglomerates admit that there is blatant discrimination against certain political fields of thought.
Tyler Gidseg | Treasurer
No matter what you do, you can’t escape social media. It’s everywhere, and if you don’t have a Facebook account your friends will probably lampoon you for still living in the dark ages.
Essentially, social media as we know it encompasses four huge businesses: Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Instagram. However, the big question that these companies face is whether or not they should censor user-created content.
This contentious issue has reignited the debate on whether tech companies should have the power to regulate speech on their platforms. It should not come as a surprise that these corporations have a mostly left-leaning orientation based on their actions of penalizing certain political fields of thought.
It has been empirically shown that they specifically single out and target conservative users.
According to the Daily Caller, that top executives from Facebook and Twitter outright admitted that silicon valley is dominated by liberals.
Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, wrote a note to his staff that said, “It’s no secret that we are largely left leaning, and we all have biases, that includes me, our board, and our company.”
This revelation alone should legitimize the accusations of impropriety levied against the tech giants. This means that despite their efforts to have an unbiased, transparent structure are not viable due to their left leaning inclinations.
For instance, Tommy Robinson, an English political activist and founder of the English Defense League was suspended from Twitter for engaging in “hate speech”.
They generalized his conduct as maliciously attacking Islam, but he was only citing violent statistics that were committed from certain fringe groups in Islam. They didn’t report what Tommy Robinson was talking about because it went against their ideology of intolerance.
The National Review, explains that he was banned for tweeting statistics about muslim rape gangs.
CJ Pearson is no exception. The twelve-year-old student from Georgia had his Facebook account removed for a video in support of Rudy Giuliani’s criticism of then-president Obama. CJ only agreed with Giuliani’s opinion in that he questioned Obama’s love for America.
I think we are seeing an unnerving trend of Democrats who are actively trying to stifle those who they don’t agree with. It’s not the message, but rather that they can’t stand hearing things they don’t agree with. They tend to go into complete apoplexy and react emotionally.
Recently, Alex Jones, a smart political commentator and histrionic firebrand and creator of Infowars, was banned across social media because he violated hate speech rules. According to National Review, they mention, as per Facebook and Apple, that Alex Jones “violated the social media platforms’ hate speech policies”.
Love him or hate him, what those companies did was terrible and undermined his free speech. This situation was nothing short of political censorship.
Apple started its reign of censorship by first pulling Jones’ podcasts from Itunes.
Facebook followed suit by unpublishing his pages as well as his personal account.
Alex Jones is also known for his conspiracy theories, some which seem to hold some truth.
We have to understand that this puts a very dangerous precedent on free speech for everyone. After all, his free speech is our free speech.
The First Amendment guarantees everyone the right to expression. However, we find ourselves in a time where conservatives are incontrovertibly suppressed by those who want to silence them. Most predominantly censorship has been incurred by those on the Left.
A huge company like Facebook shouldn’t have the authority to decide what free speech is. It is this collectivist, virtual-signaling mentality that drives them to single out people like Alex Jones because they see him as a threat to their political agenda.
They seem to care so much about diversity, but not diversity of thought. They essentially have the power on their platform to decide what is truth and what is not.
We shouldn’t silence people.
On the contrary, we should be able to hear everyone. I think the best way to expose any kind of idea, whether it be good or bad, is to have an open intellectual discussion about it.
The best means of expelling bad ideas is to expose them in the open marketplace of ideas.
The idea that Facebook has better judgment than the Constitution — when it comes to free speech — is asinine.
Yes, businesses have the right to do what they want, but these companies should be held to a higher standard because of social media’s ability to reach millions of people with the click of a button.
The issue is that information can be easily manipulated and funneled to only show certain content while militating others.
That in of itself is a great power and can be very dangerous in the wrong hands. Moreover, it could be weaponized to distort the truth and used as a veneer to sway a very impressionable audience into thinking a certain direction.
The big double standard here is that tech companies have algorithms and programs in place to target conservative posts while ignoring liberal ones. For example, Google executives at a private meeting were shown in a leaked video expressing their blatant resentment and dismay of Trump’s 2016 election.
The question is, how can a company possibly have the temerity to claim to be unbiased when they are openly trying to stymy Trump and hinder those who support him?
The problem with the moniker of “hate speech” in the realm of social media is with its contrived interpretation and outright targeting of conservative and Republican content.
Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, was recently called to a Senate committee hearing on April 11th of this year to determine that the company was operating within ethical standards.
However, Ted Cruz, the Texas senator, raised alarming concerns that Facebook was practicing a pattern of pervasive behavior toward people on the Right based on Zuckerberg’s testimony.
In fact, there were numerous cases of the tech giant actively suppressing conservatives.
Don’t take it from me though.
According to the science and technology website, Gizmodo, former Facebook workers openly admitted to suppressing news stories from reaching conservative readers by controlling what goes on in the trending section.
However, the blatant artifice doesn’t stop there. Facebook even had so-called “news curators” who were only known internally to the company correct and alter the news.
This secret job required employees to discreetly inject frivolous news stories into the trending section, even if they weren’t popular enough to be inclusive. Furthermore, they were also instructed to not include trending Facebook stories into the section.
Basically, they would curate online news stories into the trend feed and change them. This means that they would give them redacted editorials reflective of the values of themselves and on the behalf of Facebook.
According to Gizmodo, a former curator said that “I’d come on shift and I’d discover that CPAC or Mitt Romney or Glenn Beck or popular conservative topics wouldn’t be trending because either the curator didn’t recognize the news topic or it was like they had a bias against Ted Cruz.”
This is all in stark contrast to Facebook’s credibility of topics that become popular on the site. Other examples of censorship included the IRS Lois Lerner scandal of scrutinizing conservative groups, Chris Kyle, the Navy Seal who was murdered in 2013, and former Fox News contributor Steven Crowder.
Moreover, new outlets like Breitbart, Washington Examiner, and Newsmax that were trending enough to be picked up by Facebook’s algorithm were regulated.
Now, why would they do that?
Why would they ban pro-Christian pages, Trump supporters Diamond and Silk, and the Chick-fil-A appreciation page? I think we can extrapolate why.
In my personal view, I think it is dangerous for Facebook to be the arbiter of what is considered free speech. It is clearly not right for a company to decide what is considered appropriate forms of speech. It is subjective: how could a company determine what hate speech is when Zuckerberg himself couldn’t even define it?
I believe it is a tacit argument that the Left ideology has a monopoly on what I call the principles of edification. They have a grasp on the media, academia, and Hollywood. This kind of power could be easily used to pervade people to believe in ostensible, inaccurate news.
This Facebook hearing is a great example that big tech giants are culpable of using Machiavellian tactics to control and manipulate information for an unsuspecting audience.
We can gleam this from Zuckerberg’s testimony at the committee hearing. I don’t think that Facebook’s actions have been innocuous, rather, that they were complicit in using private information in expedient ways and using their trending system to undermine actual trending stories.
Of course, subsequently after the hearing, they went into damage control, but their response and attitude are disingenuous against their actions.
I think that all speech should be protected, including seditious, inflammatory speech. It needs to be made public so that it can be judged in the marketplace of ideas and not controlled by some all-powerful company.
I believe ideas that people don’t like should be debated, not censored.
Right on Campus, Inc. 