Big Tech is discriminating against conservatives and independent thinkers by censoring them online, which has a cumulative effect because it also prevents followers from hearing about new ideas and viewpoints, according to a report released Wednesday by the Media Research Center (MRC) Free Speech America.
MRC calls this "secondhand censorship," which it defines as the number of times that users on social media have information kept from them.
According to the study, users were affected by secondhand censorship more than 140 million times in the first quarter of this year. That was the result of direct censorship of individuals and organizations at least 4,000 times.
The study cited some of the worst examples of secondhand censorship, such as when President Donald Trump was censored and more than 90 million followers could no longer interact with his posts.
Another example was the New York Post’s report on Hunter Biden's laptop before the 2020 election. The study pointed out that censorship occurred when Facebook reduced distribution before a fact-check and Twitter locked the New York Post's account.
The MRC study, using its own CensorTrack database, cited Facebook as the worst offender, with users undergoing secondhand censorship 86,627,526 times. YouTube was second at 23,543,230, and Twitter third at 17,065,054.
"In just three months, actions by Big Tech censors kept content from reaching users over 140 million times," Media Research Center founder and President Brent Bozell said. "If Donald Trump was still on Twitter, the first quarter number would have been over 150 billion."
Bozell lamented, "It's truly mind-boggling that the Silicon Valley speech police have this kind of power," adding, "this report gets us one step closer to understanding the real impact anti-conservative discrimination at Facebook, Twitter and others are having on speech in this country."
Brian Freeman ✉
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
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