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Fighting Social Media Censorship

Conservatives are constrained in their attempts to overcome the censorship of social media sites.

Strict devotion to the First Amendment, and opposition to internet regulation prevents them from advocating for government intervention or oversight. Unlike their opponents on the left, they do not believe that any form of speech should be subjected to government control.

The issue is of crucial importance. There is little doubt that the internet is a decisive force in the 21stcentury American politics.  The Pew Research Center  found that 62% of American adults get news from social media. An NYU research project notes that “Our study of search engines suggests that they systematically exclude… certain types of sites in favor of others… giving prominence to some at the expense of others.”

The internet research organization Can I Rank reports that Google “search results were almost 40% more likely to contain pages with a “Left” or “Far Left” slant…Moreover, 16% of political keywords contained no right-leaning pages at all within the first page of results…the Google algorithm itself may make it easier for sites with a left-leaning or centrist viewpoint to rank higher in Google search results compared to sites with a politically conservative viewpoint.”

The issue began to garner an even greater degree of note when, as reported by Lifesite “Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai scolded Twitter…for censoring conservative users of its platform…’ The company has a viewpoint…and uses that viewpoint to discriminate…to say the least, the company appears to have a double standard when it comes to suspending or de-verifying conservative users’ accounts as opposed to those of liberal users…’”

In 2016, writes Robby Soave in the New York Post, “Twitter…formed the Orwellian-named ‘Trust and Safety Council’ to propose changes to the company’s use policies… practically none of the 40 people chosen to be part of the council are all that concerned about free speech…”
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Some have taken to the courts for relief reports Max Greenwood in The Hill. Political consultant Roger Stone has filed a lawsuit against internet giant Twitter, an institution that has been noted for harassing conservative accounts. Twitter gained a great deal of notoriety when one of its employees cut off President Trump’s account. Twitter has openly “purged” conservative accounts on occasion. Similarly, You Tube and its parent corporation Google have been sued by the right-leaning educational site PragerU for censoring its online videos. The blatant nature of You Tube’s bias can easily be discerned by the organization’s use of an extreme left-wing group, the Southern Poverty Law Center, to decide what constitutes “offensive” speech.

Selwyn Duke proposes in The Hill using antitrust laws, but that runs into conservative objections as well.  “I may object to such things. But here’s the issue: if antitrust laws are unjust, eliminate them. But if we’re going to have them, they should be applied where most needed. As for Google, most people admit it’s ‘a de facto monopoly.’ The breakup of AT&T’s Bell System was mandated in 1982. That came even without Bell denying service to people, blocking their calls or hiding their phone numbers based on the content of their conversations.”

There may be another alternative. Conservatives rightly objected to the dangers of government control inherent in classifying internet providers as “common carriers.”  But, traveling a path as precise as threading a needle, a modified version of the common carrier concept could be applied without the overlay of government control that proponents of the concept maintain is necessary for the more physical world of trains and planes.  That highly modified common carrier concept could warrant—without any other government intrusion, regulation, or oversight– that monopolistic internet giants such as Twitter and Google treat all users equally.

This article, written by Editor-in-Chief Frank Vernuccio, originally appeared in the Washington Times. 

Dept.of Commerce photo