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There is clearly a pattern with the new media giants of our technology world. I am not a fan of regulation but I do look for reasonable, market driven alternatives. As private commercial entities, the social media giants are not legally bound by the First Amendment to the US Constitution, and are free to set their own standards and conditions for the use of their platforms. Ideally, those standards should be applied equally to all users, regardless of political or other persuasion.

As a matter of fair competition, if these companies choose what to publish and what not to publish, they should be subject to the same licensing and requirements as media organizations.

  • If the big social media companies choose what to publish and what not to publish, they should be subject to the same licensing and requirements as media organizations.
  • Google has decided it will not renew a contract with the Pentagon for artificial intelligence work because Google employees were upset that the technology might be used for lethal military purposes. Yet Google is planning to launch a censored search engine in China that will empower a totalitarian “Big Brother is watching you” horror state.
  • Freedom Watch filed a $1 billion class-action lawsuit against Apple, Facebook, Google, and Twitter, claiming that they suppress conservative speech online.
  • A Media Research Center report found that Google, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube stifle conservative speech and that in some instances staffers have admitted that doing so was intentional.
  • Chinese officials prevented a journalist, Liu Hu, from taking a flight because he had a low “social credit” score. According to China’s Global Times, as of the end of April 2018, authorities had blocked individuals from taking 11.14 million flights and 4.25 million high-speed rail trips.

Consider this:

In April, the conservative Media Research Center released a report detailing the suppression of conservative opinions on social media platforms.

The 50-page report, “Censored! How Online Media Companies Are Suppressing Conservative Speech,” which looked at how conservative political speech fared on Google, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, found that the tech companies stifle conservative speech and that in some instances, staffers have admitted that doing so was intentional. The report found that Google showed a “tendency toward left-wing bias in its search results”, and that Twitter (by admission of its own employees) had “shadow-banned” some conservative users. (“Shadow banning” means that their content did not appear to other users, but the account owners themselves had not been notified of this “banning” of their content).

Source: Big Tech Snuffing Free Speech; Google’s Poisonous ‘Dragonfly’