by Kyle Perisic
President Donald Trump’s campaign manager, Brad Parscale, blasted big tech companies’ censorship of conservatives in an op-ed Thursday, saying the censorship must stop before the internet becomes “Big Brother.”
“Big Tech’s anti-conservative bias is positively institutional. Facebook, Google (YouTube), and Twitter all work with the Southern Poverty Law Center, a far-left organization with a proven track record of anti-conservative bias, to decide what is and isn’t ‘hate speech,’” Parscale wrote in the Washington Examiner op-ed.
Parscale pointed to the many examples of Facebook, Twitter, Google, and YouTube’s recent bans on outspoken conservative pundits.
The few examples he lists are: Republican congressional candidate Elizabeth Heng, whose ad was banned on Facebook, and controversial commentator Alex Jones and his website Infowars, who was de-platformed on Facebook and YouTube.
Additionally, Parscale called out Twitter hypocrisy for temporarily banning Candace Owens, but not Sarah Jeong. Owens is the Media Director of Turning Point USA — a college student organization. She parodied tweets written by Jeong, The New York Times’ new editorial board member, who has a history of racist anti-white tweets.
Owens restated Jeong’s tweets, except made them anti-Semetic.Twitter later said it was “an error.”
The censorship, Parscale alludes to, is borderline illegal under the Communications Decency Act, which sets the legal differences between a publisher and an open forum, like Twitter and Facebook.
Publishers are subject to libel laws, whereas public forums are not held accountable for libel because they are not the publisher of said libel.
“[W]ebsites such as Facebook and Twitter are not treated as publishers of ‘information provided by another’ — which would subject them to libel laws and other headaches publishers have to deal with — because they ‘offer a forum for a true diversity of political discourse,’” he writes.
Parscale added: “Big Tech is not just biased against conservatives — it is actively trying to silence them and deprive them of online platforms.”
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Kyle Perisic is a reporter at Daily Caller News Foundation. Follow Kyle on Twitter @KylePerisic.
