The evidence that conservatives have been silenced and shut down on multiple social media platforms is overwhelming. On one hand, there are people who get shut down for saying what they truly believe, but because they express right-of-center viewpoints they get shut down. On the other hand, there have been people who use vulgar language that violates the user agreement policies on these platforms, but they are not shut down simply because they’re liberals or part of the “resistance” against Donald Trump. What could possibly be the reason that people on the right are consistently shut down, while people on the left simply have their posts overlooked? The liberal bias of social media companies.
Now, these companies claim to simply make their decisions on whether or not to censor someone based on their user agreement policies, but the reality couldn’t be further from the truth. The people who set policy at companies like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are overwhelmingly liberal. Based the percentage of Democratic campaigns they donate to compared to Republican ones, and many public statements made by company leadership that clearly showcase liberal viewpoints, the bias is obvious. There have been many who have publicly called for the rapes and murders of members of the first family, including young Barron Trump. None of them were shut down. On the other hand, Candace Owens, Director of Communications for Turning Point USA, was banned for copying, pasting, and changing one word from past tweets from Sarah Jeong, a new member of the Editorial Board of The New York Times, who was not banned. So what did she change? She altered the word “white” to “black.” The original tweets were clearly racist, so why did Twitter choose to only apply its rules to Owens?
Another example of the liberal bias is on YouTube. Many conservative channels like Louder with Crowder and Prager U, and even classical liberals like Dave Rubin, have all been demonetized. What that means is that their videos no longer make any money when an advertisement is played before or during the video. Essentially, YouTube is withholding money from their content creators because they express conservative viewpoints. The best example of this is Dave Rubin posting two videos, one calling socialism good and the other calling socialism evil. Guess which one was demonetized? In addition to this, conservative videos rarely come up on the “trending” section of YouTube, although liberal viewpoints like The Young Turks regularly come up even though they have fewer views than the conservative videos.
But let’s not forget about the wild cases like that of famous conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. He has been removed from most social media platforms for his viewpoints. Although I also disagree with Jones on a wide variety of issues, that doesn’t mean that he deserved to be banned. Even though this happened quite a while ago, Twitter never said exactly what Jones did that got him banned other than violating community guidelines for bullying, which is very vague. If his opinions are as crazy as they seem, the public has a right to know. As history has shown, simply banning someone or something does not make their ideas go away. If anything, it gives them more power. Twitter should have just let Alex Jones and his conspiracy theories die on their own.
Okay, so the evidence is clearly there, but what are the solutions to this problem? So do I really believe that we need to turn social media into a public utility to allow for strict guidelines to be followed? No. But I do believe that it is time for those who set these crazy policies to understand that they do not have the right to silence people simply because they disagree with them on politics. They need to hold themselves accountable and look at what is said from an objective point of view. Was the tweet actually racist? Was the Facebook post actually blatant sexism? What was said in that YouTube video against FCC regulations? It’s time for these companies to be honest and for more conservative media outlets like CRTV and The Daily Wire to step up and take down the competition.
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