Big Tech is “probably shifting this year in this election about 15 million votes without anyone’s awareness” — and “without leaving a paper trail for authorities to trace.” So said liberal researcher Dr. Robert Epstein in 2020, issuing a warning that essentially was:
We now have a government by Big Tech, of Big Tech, and for Big Tech.
Now, three years later, they’re at it again, tilting the playing field for the 2024 election. In fact, Joe Biden’s opponents — from Donald Trump to liberal Democrat-turned-Independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — have already been censored by Big Tech 162 times, according to a recent study. And Biden the fumbling fabulist?
He’s been censored only seven times.
(Perhaps seven more than a cynic would expect.)
Google was the worst offender, too; the behemoth, which accounts for approximately 83 percent of the global desktop search market, has censored candidates 112 times. The biggest victim was entrepreneur and GOP candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who has already had his words airbrushed on 18 occasions.
Fox News reported on the story last week:
Media Research Center’s (MRC’s) CensorTrack.org researchers Heather Moon and Gabriela Pariseau conducted the study that found 169 cases of censorship … across Google, YouTube, Facebook, X, Instagram, TikTok and LinkedIn.
“The year 2024 has not yet begun, but election-interfering censorship is well underway as Big Tech companies have already censored every presidential candidate,” Moon and Pariseau wrote.
“From censoring candidates’ campaign websites, to fact checks, to removing content and accounts altogether, social media platforms have been hard at work interfering in the upcoming election and silencing the voices of those who seek to represent and lead the United States,” they wrote. “Big Tech censorship impacted the accounts of all 23 candidates that MRC has been tracking regardless of party affiliation, but it has been particularly harmful for Biden’s opponents.”
The study found that Big Tech platforms have “manipulated the message of all 2024 presidential candidates at least once….”
The censorship of Ramaswamy was especially telling — and troubling. Consider that, the MRC writes, the candidate “was censored multiple times by Google, including its YouTube platform, as well as by LinkedIn….”
“Of all the tech giants, Google censored Ramaswamy the most,” the MRC continues. “Including not showing Ramaswamy’s campaign website on the first page of its search results, Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot Bard left him off its list when MRC researchers asked it to rank the 2024 presidential candidates.”
This is striking deception, rising to the level of a lie by omission. Perhaps the most relevant search result when investigating a candidate is his campaign website. Relegating Ramaswamy’s site to a lower page, knowing that a good percentage of users won’t go beyond the first one, would be an obvious attempt to damage his candidacy.
(Note: When I entered Ramaswamy’s name into Google, his site was prominently displayed on the first results page. So did the MRC make a mistake here? Or did Google react to MRC and other scrutiny and, perhaps temporarily, decide to rank the site where it belongs?)
Also telling is the substance of what Big Tech chooses to censor. To wit: “Google-owned YouTube also flagged 10 of Ramaswamy’s videos with context labels, the majority of which responded to the candidate’s critique of what he calls ‘the climate change cult,’” the MRC relates. “According to the label, ‘Climate change refers to long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns, mainly caused by human activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels.’ YouTube then links out to UN climate propaganda.”
Really, though, this is also strikingly familiar. I’ve reported on Big Tech censorship for ages — and have been victim of it. For example, trying to find an old article of mine some years ago, I put relevant search terms into Google and got nothing (the result could have been on an “Internet Siberia” page, but I wasn’t going to search through scores of them. Who would?). I then copied the search terms and entered them into DuckDuckGo — which is a smaller and, at least at the time, a more honest search engine — and my article was the very first result. Coincidentally, a reader contacted me perhaps a couple of days later and said he had the exact same experience while searching for my work.
In reality, this is malpractice. A search engine’s role is to provide relevant results based on your search terms, not its agenda. But Google is not a search engine today — it’s a propaganda engine.
Returning to the MRC’s findings, after Ramaswamy, “Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was censored 17 times to finish second, with 15 of them coming when he was a Democrat and two after he switched to Independent,” relates Fox. “Nikki Haley faced censorship 14 times, Larry Elder 13 times, and former President Trump was censored nine times….”
Some of the MRC’s findings require perspective, however. That is, the site writes that “Elon Musk’s X platform tampered with presidential candidates’ messages…. The X platform [Twitter] tacked a total of 115 Community Notes onto numerous presidential accounts. Fifty-four of them were appended to President Biden’s posts, making him the most censored presidential candidate on the platform.”
Is this really censorship, though? “Community notes” are simply majority-user-determined corrections appended to ostensible misinformation. Unlike Big Tech censorship, this isn’t an algorithm or odd techie deciding you’re “wrong” and removing or suppressing your content. Flagged posts remain on X — albeit with the note, which is the result of informational democracy in action. It’s the difference between the pseudo-elite and the street, between an invisible oligarchy and the market’s invisible hand.
This isn’t to say that Truth is determined by majority vote, that informational “mob justice” is inerrant. But I use X and have not yet seen an incorrect community note. And that’s my “community note” on the MRC’s analysis of community notes!
Really, though, this is very much like our elections. The people’s determinations are far from perfect.
But would you rather be subject to theirs or those of a handful of Big Tech pseudo-elites?
The latter is what we have in virtually the entire Big Tech realm. And because of it, frighteningly, it’s also what may be visited upon us in our 2024 election.
