An opinion piece by Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation with the title “Big Tech Has Become an Enemy of the People” appeared today in the StarTribune. ( https://www.startribune.com/big-tech-has-become-an-enemy-of-the-people/600145848/ ) Amen to that!
He recommends various steps to rein in big tech companies and their censorship of incorrect political views or “disinformation,” meaning information that the executives of the tech companies disagree with and/or that would harm their profits.
One interesting tidbit he gives is that Republican members of Congress are censored or removed from these platforms 51 times more often than Democratic members.
I might not have believed it if we had not been censored so much by not only big tech but also traditional newspapers and both liberal and conservative websites in our attempts to run ads that merely stated conservative estimates of how many deaths of despair the COVID lockdowns would cause, which turned out to be lower than reality, and the fact that those would result in more loss of life than the amount of life saved by prevented COVID deaths. In other cases, we submitted ads stating peer-reviewed science that appeared in prestigious medical journals showing the lockdowns threw 1 in 5 Americans into major clinical depression. So these were simple facts known to be true in one case or the best conservative estimates in another. They weren’t even matters of opinion. And big tech would not allow us to publicize them.
In another case, YouTube removed video of a congressional hearing!, of a congressional hearing!, because its subject was the possible effectiveness of ivermectin to treat COVID.
Absolutely, big tech needs to be reined in or preferably destroyed.
Here is a link to the full Heritage Foundation report. https://www.heritage.org/technology/report/combating-big-techs-totalitarianism-road-map