Censorship & Big Tech

Created Disinformation Governance Board 1984 style https://www.dhs.gov/news/2022/08/24/following-hsac-recommendation-dhs-terminates-disinformation-governance-board 

  • Zuckerberg issued letter admitting that Meta gave into government pressure for censorship https://www.politico.com/news/2024/08/26/zuckerberg-meta-white-house-pressure-00176399

  • Censorship - threatened social-media companies with retribution, including antitrust lawsuits, if they don’t censor speech that the government didn’t like. The Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in September ruled that Biden officials had violated the First Amendment by colluding with tech platforms to squelch politically disfavored speech about Covid and elections. https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/23/23-30445-CV0.pdf

  • Used government agencies to repeatedly threaten social media companies, specifically Hunter laptop story…which turned out to be true https://twitterfiles.substack.com/p/1-thread-the-twitter-files (see chapter on lies/hoaxes)

  • Why Google Poses a Serious Threat to Democracy, and How to End That Threat https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Epstein%20Testimony.pdf

    • In 2016, biased search results generated by Google’s search algorithm likely impacted undecided voters in a way that gave at least 2.6 million votes to Hillary Clinton

    • On Election Day in 2018, the “Go Vote” reminder Google displayed on its home page gave one political party between 800,000 and 4.6 million more votes than it gave the other party.

    • In the weeks leading up to the 2018 election, bias in Google’s search results may have shifted upwards of 78.2 million votes to the candidates of one political party (spread across hundreds of local and regional races).

    • Google’s “autocomplete” search suggestions can turn a 50/50 split among undecided voters into a 90/10 split without people's awareness (http://bit.ly/2EcYnYI)

    • Google has likely been determining the outcomes of upwards of 25 percent of the national elections worldwide since at least 2015. This is because many races are very close and because Google’s persuasive technologies are very powerful (Epstein & Robertson, 2015a).


Censorship & Big Tech - More coming w/ Harris/Walz

  • “If you act as a megaphone for misinformation, if you don’t police your platforms, we are going to hold you accountable.” - Kamala Harris

  • “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation” -Tim Walz 

  • “The privilege of using words [Trump] should be taken from him.” -Kamala Harris 

  • “If you don’t police your platforms we are going to hold you accountable.” -Kamala Harris