How big tech is stealing the presidential election
Allum Bokhari, an investigative tech writer for Breitbart, published a book last month explaining how Big Tech intends to defeat Trump. If anyone should know, it’s him, having written about Big Tech’s attacks on conservatives for years. And it’s important to read this book, because the censorship is now so vast it is difficult to learn about it by merely digging up article after article. In #Deleted: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal the Election, Bokhari goes over how it’s being stealthily done on many fronts, usually under the guise of something else.
Big Tech uses certain buzzwords to justify its censorship, cleverly all vague, used as excuses to crack down on conservative content. They include “fake news,” “misinformation,” “hate speech,” “harassment” and even “bots.” Twitter employees have admitted if an account has a certain number of words, such as “guns” and “God” in their profile, they may delete it claiming it was a bot.
Dr. Robert Epstein, a senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology and Democrat, explained to Congress how Google shifted 2.6 to 10.4 million users to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. Experiments have been done showing how certain candidates were favored over others based on biased search results. On Google that means showing negative results about conservative candidates and positive results about left-leaning candidates at the top of search results. On Facebook, if a certain video influenced a conservative to take a less conservative viewpoint, that video would show up higher in the newsfeed of other conservatives.
Get Our Latest News for FREE
Bokhari says the problem is the internet is no longer being run like the free market. There has been a corporate takeover of the web, as it’s become an oligopoly controlled by a handful of Big Tech companies.
Some free market conservatives resist taking any measures against Big Tech, refusing to admit the internet has degenerated into an oligopoly. They recommend creating our own competing tech companies. But precisely because the internet is now an oligopoly, it is impossible for conservative tech companies to get anywhere.
Bokhari cites Gab as an example. The social media company has attempted to become an alternative to Facebook and Twitter, that won’t ban conservatives. But Big Tech is trying to block it out of existence. Apple banned the Gab app from its App Store and Google banned it from the Google Play Store. Gab’s cloud hosting provider, domain name registrar and payments processor dropped the company. Why? Because Gab ostensibly allowed a terrorist to use its platform. This is bizarre considering how many terrorists have been allowed to use the Big Tech platforms.
The reality is 43% of Americans get their news from Facebook. And you can’t survive in conservative media without it. A Facebook insider told Bokhari in 2017 their plan was to get people to move from the right to the center. And sure enough, Facebook’s newsfeed change in January 2018 destroyed far more conservative pages than left wing. They have a “hate agent” list that includes people like Candace Owens. Facebook tracks what people do offline too, using their associations with “hate” against them. Facebook is forcing the right to de-network itself, online and offline.
Another way Big Tech censors conservatives is by cutting them off from advertisers that fund them. An advertising account manager at Google directed major advertisers to the page of the Sleeping Giants, a far-left organization that spreads smears about conservative media websites in an effort to frighten advertisers away from them.
Bokhari says Google is far more dangerous than The New York Times or CNN, calling it “The World’s Most Dangerous Company.” It’s “the greatest surveillance network in the history of mankind.” Dr. Epstein calls Google “the most powerful mind-control engine ever created.” Google Docs monitors what you type and could ban you based on not approving of your content.
In a document leaked in 2018, Google was caught calling itself “The Good Censor.” The paper described how it is moving away from the American model of free speech toward a European tradition favoring dignity and civility over freedom. Merely a handful of obscure incidents, such as a celebrity progressive being harassed, led to this transition.
One former longtime employee of Google and Twitter explained to Bokhari how Big Tech bans regular conservatives: “Basically, they take a tiny set of alt-right trolls and then they say that alt-lite [a new wave of anti-immigration, antiwar, market-skeptical right-wingers], new right, libertarians, and even nonconformist center-left have superficial similarity to the troll, like posting the same memes or following the same accounts, and therefore are all abusive.” This is exacerbated considering the left is far more likely to block and report users.
An entire chapter is dedicated to financial blacklisting. The fundraising platforms GoFundMe, Patreon and Kickstarter are banning conservatives. Electronic payment processors like PayPal and Stripe are too. The left-wing group Color of Change is demanding that credit card companies and Apple Pay oust conservatives.
Another chapter is devoted to the “defamation engine” of Wikipedia and Google. Wikipedia appears at the top of Google search results. Wikipedia bans any citation to Breitbart as a reliable source. If you try to edit a page to correct any bias against conservatives, you’ll be banned.
Bokhari says a natural solution would be removing or limitingSection 230 protections from Big Tech. They act like publishers and frequently argue in court that they are publishers, so why are they exempt from lawsuits when other publishers aren’t? I don’t think it’s intervening in the free market to allow people the ability to sue them.
Bokhari says even if you don’t want to remove Section 230 protections from most of Big Tech, since monitoring posts and other things might be onerous for the companies, it’s unfair that you can't sue the most powerful publisher in the world, Wikipedia, for defamation but you can sue The Washington Post.
He warns people that technology will eventually trace down things you wrote anonymously years ago, such as by comparing writing samples. He advises people to delete old anonymous posts. He also warns that despite its lower numbers and poor success at driving visitors to businesses, Twitter is more powerful than you think.
What it comes down to is, “Most American citizens don’t want a future where elections are decided by a Google search algorithm, where Mark Zuckerberg can render your business unprofitable with the push of a button, and where Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey decides whether you’re allowed a voice in the public square.” Don’t be fooled by Big Tech’s claims that they are merely censoring really offensive speech. The evidence is overwhelming that they are trying to influence the most mainstream of elections, the presidential election, it’s just a matter of by how many million votes.
Rachel is the editor for intellectualconservative.com and an attorney.
