How do you deal with companies whose grip on the internet is so powerful that they control more of what people see than governments?
That’s a question that more conservatives are coming to grips with. When I first began raising this issue, it was often dismissed out of hand. Conservatives believe in private enterprise. We should find alternatives to companies that maintain monopolies over the internet.
The past year has made it very clear that these alternatives are not emerging and when they do emerge, they get squashed by the big players.
Conservatives will have to address the question of how internet monopolies threaten free speech.
Google has far too much power over the national discourse. And stories like this should be a wake-up call about its power and range.
Google employees debated whether to bury conservative media outlets in the company’s search function as a response to President Donald Trump’s election in 2016, internal Google communications obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation reveal.
The Daily Caller and Breitbart were specifically singled out as outlets to potentially bury, the communications reveal.
Trump’s election in 2016 shocked many Google employees, who had been counting on Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton to win.
Communications obtained by TheDCNF show that internal Google discussions went beyond expressing remorse over Clinton’s loss to actually discussing ways Google could prevent Trump from winning again.
“This was an election of false equivalencies, and Google, sadly, had a hand in it,” Google engineer Scott Byer wrote in a Nov. 9, 2016, post reviewed by TheDCNF.
Byer falsely labeled The Daily Caller and Breitbart as “opinion blogs” and urged his coworkers to reduce their visibility in search results.
“How many times did you see the Election now card with items from opinion blogs (Breitbart, Daily Caller) elevated next to legitimate news organizations? That’s something that can and should be fixed,” Byer wrote.
“I think we have a responsibility to expose the quality and truthfulness of sources – because not doing so hides real information under loud noises,” he continued
These same arguments have been used by the media in its campaign to censor Facebook over “Fake news”. It can and should be taken seriously because it’s since become policy.
Article posted with permission from Daniel Greenfield
