Mike Huckabee: Big Tech Censorship Is Spiraling Out of Control
I told you this week about the social media site Pinterest blocking the pro-life group Live Action. In just 24 hours, that story has taken some wild turns that could have major repercussions.
Deanna Fisher at the Victory Girls’ blog does a good job of recapping what’s happened so far, and how the censorship of conservative and pro-life voices has ramped up very quickly.
As this article at RedState.com reports, Pinterest is now justifying its blocking of Live Action by claiming that it distributes harmful medical misinformation (not true: all the info on Live Action’s site about abortion is written and/or reviewed by medical doctors) and pushes anti-vaccination messages (only in that they oppose harvesting fetal body parts for vaccine development, which is also the official Trump administration policy).
But the big news is that Twitter jumped into this rumble and temporarily suspended Project Veritas’ account for tweeting information about the attack on Live Action leaked by a Pinterest whistleblower. That wasn’t “misinformation,” it was the truth that the people behind leftist, pro-abortion social media sites don’t want you to know.
As Project Veritas’ James O’Keefe put it, “Twitter has decided that investigative journalism is in violation of their terms of service.” Although I bet that if it was a negative story about Trump leaked by an alleged White House insider, it wouldn’t be a Twitter TOS violation, it would be a “trending” story.
Between this story and the recent firings of Google employees for the crime of being conservative while working in Silicon Valley, some tech world insiders who are fed up with quietly suffering the tyranny of their social justice warrior co-workers are standing up and speaking out.
The latest is former Pinterest engineer Eric Cochran, who appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show last night to accuse Pinterest of having a strong anti-Christian, anti-pro-life bias, and to call on current and former employees who are fed up to speak out.
Here’s the video of that interview:
I’ve written before that as a conservative with the usual aversion to government regulation of business, I’m reticent to wield federal power to bust these private corporations. But the fact is, these companies (Google, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, etc.) have become the modern-day version of the public square. We don’t allow the company that makes soap boxes to decide who gets to stand on them and talk. (The Red State article above makes a similar argument.)
There’s currently a debate in Republican circles about whether it’s a betrayal of conservative principles to call for government regulation to reign in the blatant leftwing bias of the tech giants. But I fear that those on the right who oppose any regulation don’t understand that they are dealing with people who have amassed great power over the public flow of information, and if left unchecked, they’ll make sure it’s impossible even to discuss “conservative principles.”
To show that even the staunchest conservative has had enough of the Silicon Valley socialist censors and is ready to trust-bust them with a sledgehammer, here is Kurt Schlichter’s latest article on that very subject.
It’s filled with his usual entertainingly blunt turns of phrase, plus a clear explanation for why action against Big Tech companies is no more a betrayal of conservative principles than was forcing racist store owners to serve blacks and Jews.
Best of all, since he is an attorney, he lays out a plan for how to go about restoring free speech to the internet without having to create a massive government regulatory bureaucracy. It would only take a few simple law changes, enforced by the threat of lawsuits.
Finally, with Twitter deciding that simply reporting news that’s inconvenient to the left is a violation of their policies, this might be a great time to remind you that I’m also now on www.Parler.com at @MikeHuckabee. It’s the new Twitter-like site that protects free speech, and you can sign up for free and follow me there, too.
Or maybe I should say, it’s the NEXT Twitter-like site.
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