Positioning themselves as “thought police,” Facebook, Google and other “Big Tech” companies pose an “existential threat to our individual liberties as well as our system of government,” contends the manager for President Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign
Brad Parscale wrote in a guest column published Tuesday by Breitbart News that Google and Facebook “have become nothing less than incubators for far-left liberal ideologies and are doing everything they can to eradicate conservative ideas and their proponents from the internet.”
He cited a recently leaked internal Google brief title “The Good Censor,” which begins by denigrating free speech as a “social, economic, and political weapon,” calling it a “utopian” idea that’s no longer practical because internet users are “behaving badly.”
Parscale pointed out the report portrays Trump as a free speech offenders, labeling him “a conspiracy theorist for pointing out — correctly — that Google manipulated search results to favor Hillary Clinton in 2016.”
Independent research by Harvard professor Robert Epstein featured in the new movie “The Creepy Line” concluded Google favored Clinton in 2016. It also found Google and Facebook could influence an estimated 12 million votes in this fall’s elections
Google, in the memo, argues that tech companies should distance themselves from the “American tradition” that “prioritizes free speech for democracy, not civility.”
In its place, the memo recommends, the United States should adopt the “European tradition” that “favors dignity over liberty and civility over freedom” to create “well-ordered spaces for safety and civility.”
Facebook, meanwhile, recently banned hundreds of prominent conservative blogs and pro-Trump pages, Parscale noted, including one with more than 3 million followers.
“What is clear is that Facebook’s election-eve purge has been long in the making,” he wrote. “Last year, reporters revealed that radical liberal activist groups have been working with Facebook to crush ‘propaganda and fake news,’ which actually means deleting conservative accounts.”
Last year, Parscale recalled, Google fired engineer James Damore “for challenging the company’s liberal echo chamber.”
In August, Facebook had its own drama, with more than 100 conservative employees expressing concern about the company’s left-wing “monoculture” and bias against conservatives.
“The internet was once a safe haven for political dissenters,” Parscale wrote. “Social media platforms and Google’s predominance as a search engine enabled a digital public square where Americans could go to express their grievances, especially in more recent years. It’s where the silent majority had a voice.”
But during the 2016 election, he said, “the forgotten men and women of America who turned to social media because they were sick and tired of the establishment swamp in Washington were inundated with pro-Clinton puff pieces when they were just searching for basic facts.”
“The real and underreported collusion scandal is actually Big Tech’s behind-the-scenes campaign to help Democrats win elections,” he said. “Though that may not even be the most disturbing thing lurking beneath Silicon Valley’s glass and steel glitz and laid-back, all-organic cafeteria vibe.”
He said that as the midterm elections approach, Google and Facebook “are clearly ramping up their purge of conservatives that first manifest in the 2016 presidential campaign.”
“Don’t listen to conservatives about this threat — read Google’s report and see the actions of Google and Facebook to recognize that when the freedoms of speech and expression are suppressed, impacting the digital public square as well as the outcome of elections, our civil society is at risk.”
