by Julie Kelly
Big Tech’s censorship has nothing to do with accuracy or fairness.
If there is any doubt Big Tech oligarchs are colluding with Team Biden to influence the outcome of the 2020 election, none other than two-time losing presidential candidate Hillary Clinton gave the game away this week.
“We can have democracy—or we can have social networks that allow the spread of weaponized disinformation about our elections,” Clinton tweeted on September 16, “But we can’t have both. Facebook, Twitter, and Google can and must act before the damage is done.”
The Democratic Party and NeverTrump Republicans—backed by a handful of anti-Trump billionaires—are preparing what fairly can be described as a post-election civil war to make sure Joe Biden takes the White House no matter what.
The insurgents have “war gamed” a number of scenarios, which include unconstitutional tactics that would result in a Biden win even if the president is legitimately reelected. President Trump recently referred to their efforts as “insurrection,” and Attorney General Bill Barr this week suggested violent agitators should be charged with sedition.
This is for real, folks.
Of course, no war plan in the modern age would be complete without the full complicity of Silicon Valley. Senate Republicans, despite years of bluster, failed to rein in these rogue entities either by revoking their protected status as “platforms” or revising campaign finance laws that would require social media giants to report in-kind campaign donations to Democrats for censoring conservative content and Republican officials without applying the same standard to members of the other party.
So Big Tech, unpunished and undeterred, is working with subversive groups such as the Transition Integrity Project and Protect the Results—misnomers to say the least—to purge their platforms of any content that calls out their tactics, particularly any post that questions the legality of vote by mail.
Democrats plan to extend Election Day into January under the guise of “counting every vote” until they collect enough ballots to declare Biden the winner. While the process drags on, social media and Internet providers will aid that effort by rigging content in the Democrats’ favor. Their complicity already is underway.
Twitter is flagging posts that warn voters about the actual risks of mail-in ballots; a September 12 tweet by the president was flagged for violating the company’s Civic Integrity Policy as the country moves ever closer to an Atlas Shrugged reality.
Twitter’s policy, announced this month, will ban “misleading claims that cause confusion about the established laws, regulations, procedures, and methods of a civic process, or about the actions of officials or entities executing those civic processes,” an arbitrary gauge that gives Twitter cover to promote the Democrats’ unprecedented mail-in ballot presidential election and squash any objection to it.
Big Brother’s blue bird smacked another Trump tweet on Thursday after the president insisted unsolicited ballots will lead to election-year “mayhem.” Twitter disputed his post with a disclaimer: “Experts and fact checkers have continued to assure American voters that voting by mail is a safe and secure option.” One “fact-checker” listed is ABC News. (Twitter announced late Thursday that the company’s public policy director was leaving to join Biden’s transition team.)
Just to make sure Silicon Valley submits to their demands, a group called Accountable Tech, headed by two Clinton loyalists, is demanding Twitter, Facebook, and Google scrub any content that might impede the Democratic Party’s disinformation campaign both before and after Election Day. The group released a “roadmap” for social media giants to heed; a sliding scale of penalties, including permanent deplatforming, would apply to accounts daring to run afoul of their speech-silencing rules.
Accountable Tech is going hard after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg; in a July letter to Facebook’s Oversight Board, several groups aligned with Accountable Tech accused the company of “actively facilitating voter suppression, magnifying rampant election disinformation, and seeding hate.”
Zuckerberg, as expected, acquiesced. On September 1, he posted a lengthy decree detailing how Facebook would handle information about the election.
“We already committed to partnering with state election authorities to identify and remove false claims about polling conditions in the last 72 hours of the campaign, but given that this election will include large amounts of early voting, we’re extending that period to begin now and continue through the election until we have a clear result,” Zuckerberg wrote.
The social media tycoon also signaled that his platforms—Facebook also owns Instagram—will be closely involved in the Democrats’ plan to extend vote-counting past Election Day and block any attempt by the president to declare victory. “We will attach an informational label to content that seeks to delegitimize the outcome of the election or discuss the legitimacy of voting methods, for example, by claiming that lawful methods of voting will lead to fraud. This label will provide basic authoritative information about the integrity of the election and voting methods.” Facebook will protect “high risk people,” referring to Democratic governors in swing states, from any online harassment as they fulfill “their critical obligations to oversee the vote counting.”
Zuckerberg is doing his part to amplify Team Biden’s protracted Election Day strategy: he warned in a recent interview that America will have to wait “weeks” until a winner is declared. During that time, Zuckerberg promised, his massive operation will prevent any candidate, including the president, from declaring victory before results are official.
Facebook is wasting no time prepping the battle ground in favor of Democrats; this week, the platform announced it was removing accounts linked to Turning Point USA, a conservative activist group run by Charlie Kirk, a close friend of Donald Trump, Jr. (Twitter also is suspending TPUSA-tied accounts.) Kirk is an outspoken media figure with 1.8 million followers on Twitter; TPUSA has 2.2 million Facebook followers.
Google, too, is getting in on the act. The world’s most popular search engine won’t “autocomplete” searches by users looking for information on what the company calls “misleading content.” This includes any inquiry that “involves claims about one of the candidates, how to cast a ballot or the overall legitimacy of the electoral process.” Google also will remove any featured results or advertisements that prematurely declare a winner in any race.
Big Tech’s censorship has nothing to do with accuracy or fairness; abundant evidence, including the outcome of a recent congressional race in New York that was delayed for several weeks as absentee ballots were counted and discarded, shows that mail-in voting is a prescription for chaos and fraud.
Democrats, NeverTrump Republicans, the news media, Trump-hating billionaires and Silicon Valley have no intention of a repeat of 2016; that year’s defeated presidential candidate just advised Biden not to concede “under any circumstances” as Hillary Clinton remains forever tormented over her loss to Donald Trump.
Caught flat-footed last time around, this powerful coalition wants revenge and redemption—and our Big Tech masters are only too happy to help.
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Julie Kelly is a political commentator and senior contributor to American Greatness. She is the author of Disloyal Opposition: How the NeverTrump Right Tried―And Failed―To Take Down the President
Her past work can be found at The Federalist and National Review. She also has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, The Hill, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, and Genetic Literacy Project.
Photo “Joe Biden” by Gage Skidmore and “Google” by brionv CC2.0
