Twitter is just the latest social media company trying to silence conservative viewpoints from being shared on its platform, Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy told Newsmax TV.
“I think a lot of the social media companies and the Internet giants, like Google, have a long history of bias against conservatives,” he said during a Friday appearance on “American Agenda.”
Twitter placed two different warning labels on President Donald Trump’s tweets this week.
On Tuesday, the social media platform labeled a Trump tweet about mail-in ballots leading to a “Rigged Election” as misleading.
Early Friday, Twitter flagged one of the president’s tweets about riots in Minneapolis as “glorifying violence,” which is a violation of Twitter’s policies. Trump’s tweet stated “looting leads to shooting.” It was a statement used by a Miami police chief in 1967, which led to race riots.
Ruddy said Newsmax has experienced similar bias from Google, which owns YouTube. He said the company refused to carry Newsmax TV on its live cable channel system. At the time, he said, the company claimed it didn’t have the bandwidth to add the channel. Soon after Newsmax was denied, the platform added two liberal channels, he said.
“We knew that they were effectively lying to us,” Ruddy said, adding when confronted about it, Google didn’t “really have an answer.”
He also referenced a Facebook whistleblower, who said the social media company told employees to algorithmically suppress at least six conservative news sites, including Newsmax, before the 2012 presidential election.
In another example, Ruddy read an excerpt from a 2017 DMNews article that reported Google directed Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign emails to readers’ inboxes, while sending Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign into the spam folder.
Ruddy said it gave Clinton a tremendous edge in raising money and reaching more voters.
He added that “Twitter, I think, is just joining the conga line” of media companies that don’t like conservatives.
He said President Trump acted “in bounds” in signing the executive order that changes legal protections provided to social media companies.
“He is basically saying if you are going to edit, and you are going to take sides, you are no longer a forum, which is immune from defamation lawsuits,” Ruddy said. “You are actually an edited, curated content site and that’s really what these companies are.”
He said Twitter doesn’t fact-check Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, other Democrats or media organizations as it has done with Trump.
And while Ruddy said he doesn’t agree with everything Trump says on Twitter, he said, “I think everybody knows that this is a man who tells people what he thinks and this is his outlet for doing that.”
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