Social media censorship is out of control

By Jerry Newcombe

The New York Times' slogan is famously, "All the news that's fit to print." I guess Facebook's slogan should be, "All the liberal news that's fit to print." And not just Facebook, but Google, YouTube, Twitter, Vimeo, and Apple.

Look at this variety of recent examples where social media giants are allegedly censoring conservative or Christian content:

• Robert Spencer of JihadWatch.org (which alerts people to acts by radical Islamists) told my radio show: "There is a concerted effort by all of them – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google, all of them – to de-platform or choke out or to diminish the influence of anybody who dissents from the leftist agenda. And so when it comes to Facebook, for example, my website, jihadwatch.org, for years got about 20,000 referrals a day from Facebook. And in February 2017, that dropped to 2000 a day and has never recovered. It has stayed about there ever since." He also complains of being buried recently by Google searches for those looking up "jihad."
  
  
• Brian Fisher, president of Human Coalition, a group that uses social media to try to provide loving alternatives to abortion, told me: "Human Coalition, like so many of our pro-life allies, has witnessed the harsh double standard of technology giants.... While Twitter, for example, allows Planned Parenthood to promote abortion and publish other offensive content unchecked, Human Coalition has been repeatedly blocked and stalled from running truthful content that is in line with Twitter's own policies. Likewise, after backlash from abortion activists, Apple removed Human Coalition's pro-life prayer app from its App Store without warning."
  
  
• The American Family Association reports (6/28/18) that Pastor Rich Penkoski of West Virginia lost 90% of his viewers "in a matter of days." He said, "We had a reach just two weeks ago of 14 million...and now we've lost 13 million of that in one week." He does video-livestreaming: "and then as soon as it's finished – I mean literally, within seconds, it's gone."
  
  
• WND.com observes that a Gospel song, "What Would Heaven Look Like," by Zion's Joy!, which is described as "a purely spiritual Christian praise song," was censored by Facebook. Why? Supposedly for "political content." Ironically, the song envisions heaven as a place where "bigotry and hate are absent, only love and peace are present."
  
  
• YouTube, owned by Google, has censored many PragerU videos because of their conservative content. So talk host Dennis Prager is suing them. He commented to D. James Kennedy Ministries, "Delta Airlines cannot announce conservatives cannot fly on our planes, and that's what [Google-YouTube is] saying: conservatives cannot fly on our planes. And by the way, Delta would be less pernicious, because there are alternatives to Delta, but there is no alternative to Google-YouTube."
  
  
• Google, Facebook, and Twitter interfered in a May 2018 abortion-related election in Ireland. LiveAction.org notes, "Google announced that it would suspend all advertising related to the subject. The move has been condemned by pro-life groups as an attempt 'to rig the election.'" The voters in Ireland only heard pro-abortion rhetoric in their mainstream media, and big tech cut off alternative media (including ads) providing the pro-life side. The voters consequently voted for abortion.
  
  
• Ex-gay David Kyle Foster had 700 videos of sensitive, Christian testimonies of formerly sexually broken people (including ex-gays) pulled from Vimeo as allegedly "hateful" and "offensive."
  
  
• Steven Andrew, a conservative Christian Silicon Valley entrepreneur (apparently a rare breed), experienced 98% censorship by Facebook of his Christian material after the election of Trump. So he's creating USA.life (as an alternative to Facebook) and 1776.free (to compete with Google).
  
  
• Perhaps the craziest example of social media censorship: Facebook flagged as "hate speech" the Declaration of Independence on July 4th and pulled it down, until the backlash hit. The very document that gave birth to our nation – which then gave us free speech, which the big tech companies thrive on – was pulled as "hate speech." This example says it all.
  
  
• Meanwhile, an example of what was not censored from Facebook (at least not for a while) were posts actually calling for violence against pro-life Republicans.
  

And on it goes.

Joseph Farah, founder of WorldNetDaily, argues that the social tech elites are like a cartel. He writes, "The danger posed to freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of religion in America by Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Apple, et al., cannot be overstated.... If the 'Speech Code Cartel' wins, America loses."

To Facebook, et al., apparently the only news fit to print or share is that which the left agrees with. These examples keep piling up. So do the dead bodies – at least of the unborn or perhaps the victims of jihad – thanks to social media's commitment to political correctness, as opposed to the truth.

Gary Bauer made a fascinating remark (End of the Day, 8/24/18). He said the left doesn't want to win the debate. They want to shut the debate down. That in a nutshell is what seems to be happening with the high tech censorship in our day.

© Jerry Newcombe