The increasing brazenness with which the various Big Tech behemoths distort their search algorithms to hide conservative viewpoints, undermine conservatives through “shadow banning” and weaponize the sanctimonious and self-serving “fact-checking” cottage industry to suppress conservative voices has long been clear.
The 2017 dismissal of Google engineer James Damore exposed the search giant as an “ideological echo chamber” (Damore’s words) — a company that, incidentally, has a jaw-dropping 87.3 percent share of the US search market. Facebook has outright banned anti-lockdown pages and removed posts supportive of the besieged teenager Kyle Rittenhouse. Twitter affixes “fact-checking” warnings exclusively to the tweets of conservatives.
Conservative angst over Big Tech duplicity has now reached an apogee. Facebook and Twitter this week ganged up against the New York Post, founded by Alexander Hamilton and the nation’s oldest continually operating daily newspaper, in galling fashion.
The Post broke a bombshell story about Hunter Biden’s dealings with Ukrainian energy company Burisma — and the extent to which then-Vice President Joe Biden’s diplomatic efforts in the Eastern European nation might have been tainted because of it.
Facebook dutifully blacklisted the story — with its policy communications manager having the chutzpah to boast about it. Twitter followed its older corporate cousin’s lead, effectively banning in toto access to and sharing of the story.
It is, of course, fair game — indeed, it is a good thing — for public-spirited media watchdogs to closely scrutinize the Fourth Estate’s veracity (though one cannot help but wonder where this scrutiny was for the myriad journalistic outlets that reproduced, no questions asked, the infamous and reckless Hillary Clinton/Democratic National Committee bought-and-paid-for Steele dossier).
But The Post is not exactly a “fringe” outlet, and no one seems to be outright denying The Post’s reporting — not even Hunter Biden himself.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will assuredly have to answer, via Senate subpoena, for what appears to any reasonable observer to be a deliberate, partisan attempt to quash a prospective “October surprise” and elevate one particular presidential candidate over another.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) has even raised the possibility that the shameless censorship may amount to in-kind political contributions in violation of extant campaign-finance law.
But all of this raises the question: What is the proper “conservative” approach, in the 21st century, to the thorny issue of a preening, deceitful, uniformly leftist Big Tech corporate landscape — characterized by a small handful of firms exercising either monopolistic or near-monopolistic power?
Think-tanker Henry Olsen has written extensively about the American right’s decades-long malady of “free-market fundamentalism” — the liberalized notion that private-sector action is per se good and public-sector action per se bad. But whatever appeal such a sentiment might have for dorm-room libertarians reading Ayn Rand for the first time, to proffer such a creed as a viable theory of governance is to succumb to the elevation of fanciful dogma over the pragmatic realities of everyday life.
Justice and liberty are ill-served by large concentrations of tyrannical, unaccountable power, regardless of whether those concentrated power sources are public or private.
Legal theorists and policymakers are still contemplating how to reconcile the fact that our Constitution deals primarily with state action and the fact that the true threats to our liberty in the 21st century, whether in the form of online speech or digital privacy, disproportionately emanate from private, nonpublic action. That reconciliation process is unlikely to conclude any time soon.
In the interim, it is imperative that conservatives embrace the solemn responsibility of wielding the levers of political power in the service of good political order — to protect online speech from the heavy, censorious hand of Silicon Valley ideologues.
It is time for conservatives to support reform of Big Tech’s wide- ranging sweetheart legal immunity deal, Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, and antitrust enforcement against the worst offenders of concentrated power.