We’ve all read and seen the stories of social media’s censorship of conservative thought.
The news has been chockfull of stories surrounding Facebook ‘jail’, where the social media giant will ban its conservative users from sharing, posting, and commenting to groups if ‘content that violates their community standards’ is found. Facebook uses this statement as a weapon to attack conservative speech and silence conservative voices on the platform. Sometimes, if too much truth is posted, they will even ban you for a week or a month altogether.
Then there is the now-famous Twitter shadowban. Twitter has been called out by multiple conservatives, both prominent and not, for engaging in the act of blocking – or partially blocking in some cases – users or their content from reaching their audience. This means that conservative users will be able to see their ‘shared’ content, but no one else actually will.
Well, if you thought that this might go away now that it has been brought to light, I’m afraid I have some bad news: it’s getting worse.
Google has now joined the ranks, conforming with the Silicon Valley groupthink agenda, and morphing into a culture where outrage mobs and witch hunts dominate. Not only is Google notorious for burying conservative-leaning search results (think Fox News, Daily Wire, and Breitbart articles), but they are now fostering a culture that has become both a threat to its culture, but a threat to its reputation among the general public.
Google, just like its leftist peers, has long iterated that it is a ‘nonpartisan’ company. However, much like Facebook, Twitter, and other tech giants, they also reserve the right to ‘ban hate speech’ or remove content that violates their standards. This is a general license to engineer public opinion by removing anything their employees (Silicon Valley Outrage Mobs) disagree with and is downright dangerous.
This censorship campaign across social media and tech platforms has affected many, including prominent figures like Candace Owens and Diamond and Silk.
There are many instances that point to Google’s conformance with, and implementation of, the censorship agenda. Supposedly, Google is a corporation that supports freedom of speech and expression, but Google is also a place where you can get in trouble for defending conservative stances and ‘make people feel unsafe at work.’
From Republican Google software engineer Mike Wacker:
More importantly, if you can control who belongs at Google, then you can also control what content belongs on Google.
If the people who work at Google — or who feel psychologically safe expressing their opinions at Google — are only the ones who think that CPAC and Kay Coles Jame are hateful, then don’t be surprised if, one day in the future, hate speech is used as a pretext to censor CPAC or Kay Coles James and remove their content from Google’s platforms.
In terms of controlling who belongs at Google, these outrage mobs and witch hunts have another tool at their disposal when they target an employee of Google: HR complaints. Few organizations have as much as power to control who belongs at Google as HR does, and if that power is abused, the consequences will be disastrous.
Standing up to an outrage mob or a witch hunt is hard enough when HR doesn’t get involved. It gets even harder when you start worrying about whether HR will discipline you, or even worse when they actually do discipline you. A few months ago, the Lincoln Network released their 2019 Viewpoint Inclusion Survey Report, and one of the pull quotes from that survey directly captures this experience:
CONSERVATIVE — Employees will interpret your words in the most offensive way possible, then report you to HR based on that interpretation. It’s one big offendedness sweepstakes. When people get in trouble, it’s often based not on what they said, but on how others interpreted their words, regardless of how unreasonable that interpretation is. And there is some evidence HR does have a political agenda. I’ve even seen someone get reported to HR for sharing a National Review article.
One Google employee, who gave me permission to share his story, was once hauled into a meeting with management and HR over some of his writings on company message boards. He was not directly punished in that meeting, but the meeting did carry a strongly implied threat of future punishment. Here was one of the issues that were mentioned to him in writing after that meeting:
One Googler raised a concern that you appeared to be promoting and defending Jordan Peterson’s comments about transgender pronouns, and this made them feel unsafe at work.
Allegedly, Google is a company that supports freedom of expression, but Google is also a company where you can get in trouble with HR for defending Jordan Peterson’s stance that the government cannot compel speech, including compelling the usage of preferred pronouns.
I’m sure many of you have heard many other stories like this one. The frightening thing is, for obvious reasons, most people are either afraid of sharing these stories, or otherwise, don’t want to share them.
So, what can be done about these outrage mobs and witch hunts across social media and tech platforms?
Keep speaking up and speaking out. If this happens to you, gather evidence and share your story. Don’t stay silent.
Now we all know that Google’s definition of ‘hate speech,’ like Facebook’s definition of what ‘violates their community standards,’ is ‘anything that their activist employees perceive as hateful.’ This type of culture and authority to censor is dangerous and outright wrong.
Democracies cannot survive if only one mouthpiece is speaking, and only one opinion gets the open platform to voice their priorities and agendas. These are things for people to decide. We don’t need Facebook, Twitter, or Google to do the deciding for us.
If allowed to continue their covert, dangerous work unchecked, these leftist tech mobs will find and silence any conservative, any Christian, any independent researcher or free thinker that doesn’t align with their groupthink and conform to their agenda. From these instances alone, Google has undoubtedly and vividly displayed that enable and encourage these censorship witch hunts.
They selectively control who get employed at Google, and thus can engineer what content shows up on Google.
No democracy can survive this way. Freedom of speech must prevail, and action must be taken to remove the human filters working behind the scenes immediately.
