Online Manipulation by Big Tech Ramping up for the 2024 Election (2024)

Have you noticed the top of your feed on Facebook is now full of left-wing posts, even though you hardly have any left-wing Facebook friends? The last couple years, where we saw nothing but relationship memes and people mourning the death of a pet, are over. Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg, infamous for pouring $419 million of ZuckBucks into the 2020 election in heavily Democratic areas, is now focusing the platform on getting out the Democratic message before the 2024 election.

Similarly, it has become almost impossible to find conservative information through a Google search, as if Google has suppressed it completely from sight. It is very Orwellian, scrubbing conservative viewpoints from the internet. Since almost everyone gets their information through companies on the internet now, there is no traditional free speech anymore — hardly anyone attends public town halls or listens to speakers in parks. As I wrote previously, these ostensibly private corporations are not really even private due to their interspersing with government; they are squelching the free speech of conservatives.

After the jury verdict against Donald Trump was handed down in the p*rn star Stormy Daniels’ case, the internet blew up with searches for how to donate to Trump. However, Google buried the results down after MSM articles byReuters, CNBC, The Hill, The New York Times, CBS News, Axiosand more. The Trump campaign had to buy an ad in order to show up above those search results.

A current search of Google News for Donald Trump shows nothing but MSM results going down the entire page of about 40 results, with the exception of a lone Fox Business article. And some would argue Fox barely leans conservative these days. DuckDuckGo, which conservatives used for years as an alternative to Google, isjust as bad. Brave isalmost as bad, with a couple more Fox News articles and oneNew York Postresult.

Psychologist and Democrat Robert Epstein examined how much bias Google puts into its search results and how much that impacts elections. He issued a report on the Search Engine Manipulation Effect in 2015 andtestified to Congress in 2019. He said the biased results steered at least 2.6 million votes to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. Epstein believes that Google has likely been determining the outcomes of upwards of 25% of national elections worldwide since at least 2015.

Thankfully, word is starting to get out about Luxxle, an unbiased search engine. It provides not only regular search and news search results, but a feature called Lenses allows people to choose whether to receive only right-leaning results or only left-leaning results.

LinkedIn was co-founded by Reid Hoffman, who funded the E. Jean Carroll case against Trump. Microsoft bought the platform in 2016 and has continued the left-wing slant, suspending users who post about election fraud (I’ve been suspended three times myself).

YouTube, which is owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, has become almost intolerable with its recommendations of left-leaning videos after you’ve finished watching anything political. It severely censored videos about election fraud and COVID-19, only recently backing off on election fraud. I have two strikes on my videos; if I get a third one I am permanently banned.

A YouTube search on Donald Trump brings up almost all MSM results, with the exception of a few Fox News articles and Trump’s own sites. Fortunately, Rumble is fast becoming a viable alternative for conservative videos. Steve Bannon, one of the most popular political podcasters in the country, wasbanned from YouTube in 2021 but is thriving just fine without it on Rumble.

Since Elon Musk bought Twitter, renaming it to X, the bias there against conservatives has almost been completely eliminated. There are a few conservative accounts that remain banned or shadowbanned, but those folks are discovering they can quietly create new accounts to get around it. Musk released the Twitter Files to expose how the government was coercing Twitter to suppress conservative speech under the guise of “misinformation.”

In 2022, then-Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs’ office pressured social media companies to censor posts by her Republican opponents, claiming it was misinformation. Her targets included the Arizona Republican Party and former conservative legislator Kelly Townsend.

Newsbusters observed that the left refers to its censorship using the deceptively innocuous phrase “content moderation.” Newsbusters reported that heavily funded Soros progressive groups are currently trying to suppress conservative speech about the verdict in the p*rn star case. Maya Wiley, president and CEO of the coalition the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights said in astatement about the verdict, “In this overheated environment, it’s vital for social media companies to enforce their content moderation policies and prevent lies from spreading unchallenged.”

Some of the censorship is done indirectly. NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index "generate blacklists of ostensibly risky or unreliable American news outlets for the purpose of discrediting and demonetizing the disfavored press,” according to a lawsuit filed byThe Daily Wire,The Federalistand Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton against the government last December. The complaint said the government "funded, promoted and/or marketed" the two.

Almost daily, a paid troll on X trots out Newsguard’s rating of the publication I write for in order to harass me.

"The days of conservatives sitting back and doing nothing while a corrupt censorship-industrial complex actively bulldozes the First Amendment are over," Federalist Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway said in a written statement.

The MSM’s discussion of search engine bias focuses on things like whether AI is racist. The left-leaning Wikipedia, which claims to be a modern day version of encyclopedias with a wide reach, doesn’t even mention bias against conservatives in its section on politics within anarticle on Internet Manipulation.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 grants broad immunity to big tech since they ostensibly serve as neutral parties rather than content creators. But we all know this isn’t true. A solution isn’t going to be easy, so we need to continue hammering at the problem from all angles.