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Twitter’s lockout of “The Babylon Bee” last week is only the latest example of Big Tech’s censorship of conservative voices, political commentator Mollie Hemingway said.
“You cannot possibly have been alive in the last five years and think that social media companies do anything other than amplify leftwing insanity and crush anything from the right that hurts the left,” she said.
The debate around the possible injection of political bias into Big Tech company policies has persisted for years, as has the discussion on free speech, Silicon Valley’s constantly fluctuating and often vague content moderation policies, attempts to curb “misinformation” and the rights of a company to operate its business how it sees fit vs. the importance of public discourse in an increasingly virtual world. A pattern has emerged of right-leaning voices being censored far more often than those on the left.
In a recent example, Rep. Vicky Hartzler, a Republican Senate candidate from Missouri, was suspended from Twitter in February after tweeting about transgender women in sports. “Women’s sports are for women, not men pretending to be women,” she tweeted from her campaign account. Twitter notified Hartzler she had violated the company’s rules against “hateful content” and would reinstate her account only if she deleted the tweet.
Both Democrats and Republicans have pushed for steps to be taken to reign in the enormous power wielded by Big Tech companies. Disagreements remain on how such measures should be taken. Calls to repeal Section 230, break up the tech companies or police their actions through the creation of a government advisory board all have cropped up. Yet critics have argued that government intervention could lead to censorship against political opponents and everyday Americans by the party in power.
Digital strategist Bret Jacobson told Fox News Digital that concerns related to tech censorship should be addressed by consumers rather than “draconian” and “unwise” government attempts to control what users see and hear.
“It has to be a monumentally bad idea that both Democrats and Republicans can agree on when trying to control U.S. citizens’ speech,” he said. “It’s not a good sign any time politicians are leaping toward censorship.”
–Alan Goforth | Metro Voice
