Published on May 4, 2019
Facebook, Google Pour Big Money into Lobbying Congress While Blacklisting Conservatives
By Sean Moran
Facebook and Google increasingly influence Congress as the social media giants censor conservative and alternative voices, dominate the Internet, and violate Americans’ privacy.
Facebook announced on Thursday that they have banned several conservative personalities such as Infowars host Alex Jones, Infowars contributor and YouTube personality Paul Joseph Watson, journalist and activist Laura Loomer, and Milo Yiannopoulus. The social media giant also banned Louis Farrakhan from its platforms.
Facebook said that they banned these personalities because they were “dangerous.”
Amid calls for greater regulation of social media companies’ potential anticompetitive behavior, censorship of conservative and alternative voices, and privacy violations, Facebook and Google have remained at the top of Open Secret’s database of top spenders lobbying Congress.
So far in 2019, Facebook spent $3,400,000 and Google’s parent company, Alphabet, $3,530,00 in lobbying Congress. Alphabet also ranked as the eighth total highest spender in lobbying in 2018, spending $21,740,000, while Facebook spent $12,620,000.
Facebook’s influence has continued to rise over the years. In the early years of President Barack Obama, Facebook spent below one million dollars in 2008 and 2009. From 2011 to 2018, Facebook’s lobbying spending skyrocketed and reached historic highs in 2018, when they spent $12.6 million.
In 2019, Facebook lobbied heavily on H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act, a Democrat bill which would restore the Obama-era Federal Communications Commission (FCC) net neutrality regulations, which arose as the result of Google’s heavy lobbying of the Obama administration. In 2019, Google also lobbied on the Save the Internet Act.
In 2018, one of Facebook’s bills on which they lobbied Congress was H.R. 2520, the Browser Act, sponsored by then Rep. and now Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), which would require social media companies such as Facebook and Google to obtain explicit permission from users for collecting their private data. The Browser Act would also stipulate that these social media companies cannot deny services to users who do not opt-in to these companies’ collection of their private data. In 2017, the Browser Act was the most important issue on Capitol Hill.
Sen. Blackburn said that her legislation would establish one set of rules that would balance the relationship between ISPs and Facebook and Google. The legislation would also prevent the social media giants from unfairly profiting off of Americans’ private data without their explicit consent.
“We need one set of rules for the entire internet ecosystem with the FTC [Federal Trade Commission] as the cop on the beat,” said Senator Blackburn. “The FTC has the flexibility to keep up with changes in technology and its principal mission is consumer protection. The BROWSER Act will enable consumers to make more educated decisions regarding the nature of their relationship with tech companies.”
In contrast, Alphabet’s most prominent issues in Congress in 2019 and 2018 related to labor and antitrust, as well as telecommunications and technology.
Facebook and Google’s dominance on the Internet has become increasingly apparent as Google has approximately 90 percent of web search traffic, whereas in digital advertising, Google and Facebook amount to nearly two-thirds of American digital ad spending, with Amazon at a “distant third” at under nine percent.
In 2018, Google lobbied Congress fourteen separate times on multiple pieces of legislation that would have increased liability for companies that enabled sex trafficking.
Facebook and Google’s influence in Congress extends to its trade group, the Internet Association. In the fourth quarter of 2018, the Internet Association spent $840,000. In total, the social media giants spent $2.6 million in 2018 for lobbying. In 2019, the association has spent $690,000 so far. Over the last two years, the Internet Association has focused on the Save the Internet Act as well as on legislation that would increase edge providers’ liability for hosting content that enables sex trafficking.
Facebook and Google influence political elections as well. During the 2018 election cycle, Alphabet donated:
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$223,269 to former Rep. Beto O’Rourke’s (D-TX) Senate campaign to unseat Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), a prominent critic of Silicon Valley censorship.
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$149,741 to Rep. Jacky Rosen’s Senate campaign (D-NV) to unseat Sen. Dean Heller (R-NV).
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$135,625 to Rep. Josh Harder’s congressional campaign.
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$124,508 to former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp’s unsuccessful re-election campaign.
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$97, 364 to former Sen. Claire McCaskill’s failed re-election campaign.
During the 2018 midterm elections, Facebook donated:
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$75,005 to O’Rourke’s Senate campaign.
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$37,954 to Sen. Doug Jones (D-AL) 2017 special Senate election against former Alabama judge Roy Moore.
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$34,534 to Heitkamp’s Senate election.
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$31,326 to McCaskill’s Senate campaign.
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$29,387 to Rosen’s successful campaign to unseat Heller.
As Facebook and Google and other social media giants continue to increasingly censor and blacklist conservative and alternative voices, more and more conservative voices have called for addressing the social media giants’ dominance of the Internet. Facebook and Google’s influence in Congress also relates to political confrontations; during a hearing in December 2018, the then-ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee delivered a sharp rebuke of Republican accusations of Google’s political bias affecting its search engines, even though Google was his top donor.
During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in April, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) said he envisions three potential remedies for big tech’s violation of free speech and dominance on the Internet.
Cruz’s three solutions include:
- Amending Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act
- Antitrust measures to address big tech’s dominant status on the Internet.
- Addressing potential cases of fraud and deception.
“No one wants to see the federal government regulating what is allowed to be said, but there are at least three potential remedies that can be considered by Congress or the administration or both,” Cruz said.
JAMES WOODS BANNED FROM TWITTER AMID SILICON VALLEY’S CONSERVATIVE BLACKLISTING CAMPAIGN
Twitter suspended Woods for a tweet that read, “‘If you try to kill the King, you best not miss’ #HangThemAll.”
By Justin Caruso
James Woods, one of the few conservative stars in Hollywood, has been locked out of his Twitter account for over a week now for “abusive behavior,” once again demonstrating the double standard the tech giant holds when it comes to enforcing rules.
Twitter suspended Woods for a tweet that read, “‘If you try to kill the King, you best not miss’ #HangThemAll,” according to his girlfriend Sara Miller.
The tweet was apparently in reference to the Mueller report, which found no conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia. The quote is from Ralph Waldo Emerson and has been used in various forms in movies and TV shows like The Wire.
Nevertheless, this post apparently met the threshold on Twitter for “abusive behavior.”
Twitter does not appear to have the same standard for leftists. As Breitbart News has reported, there are several examples of actual violent threats going unchecked by the social media company.
- Twitter allowed a number of verified accounts to participate in doxxing and violent threats against teenagers from Covington Catholic high school in January.
- Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) was on the receiving end of vicious sexist Twitter abuse after she defended Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
- Actor Peter Fonda said that Barron Trump should be taken away from his Melania and put in a cage with pedophiles. Fonda also called for Kirstjen Nielsen to be whipped. He later apologized.
- Hollywood star Jim Carrey posted a drawing of Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. getting bludgeoned to death by an elephant last year. The tweet is still up.
- In 2016, various accounts called for and cheered on the shooting of police officers.
Woods has been locked out of his account before for posting a meme.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has previously claimed that while he is “more left-leaning,” his company does not target users over political views.
“I think the real question behind the question is, are we doing something according to political ideology or viewpoints? We are not. Period. We do not look at content with regards to political viewpoint or ideology. We look at behavior,” he said last year.
Snoop Dogg Encourages Everyone to Post Louis Farrakhan Footage on Facebook and Instagram
By Jerome Hudson
Rapper and game show host Snoop Dogg took to Instagram late Thursday and urged his 31 million followers to post and share videos of Louis Farrakhan to Facebook and Instagram. The antisemitic Nation of Islam leader was banned from both platforms for what the social media giant said was Farrahkahn’s decision to “promote or engage in violence and hate.”
“If you’re down with it like I’m down with it, post your favorite Mr. Farrakhan videos on your Instagram and Facebook page,” Snoop Dogg said in an Instagram video posted Thursday. “Show some love to a real brother.”
***Graphic Langauge***
Breitbart TV
“How the fuck y’all gonna ban Minister Louis Farrakhan for putting the truth out there?” Snoop asked in a separate video. “I stand with him. I’m with him. Ban me, motherfucker.”
Snoop Dogg encouraging his followers to post videos of Farrakahn on Facebook and Instagram appears to be in clear violation of the platform’s rules, which do not allow the promotion of “hate speech […] because it creates an environment of intimidation and exclusion and in some cases may promote real-world violence.”
As recently as October Farrakhan posted a video to Twitter in which he called Jews “termites.” Twitter removed Farrakhan’s “verified” blue checkmark for hate speech.
Facebook and Instagram’s purge of conservative personalities also included Infowars host Alex Jones, Infowars contributor Paul Joseph Watson, and journalist and activist Laura Loomer.
CNBC COMPLAINING FACEBOOK NOT DELETING INFOWARS ACCOUNTS FAST ENOUGH
Compares removing accounts to a game of whack-a-mole
MAY 3, 2019
While anti-establishment voices are silenced, technological advancements are being made that will bring “fake news” to a whole new level. Who will remain to challenge it?
CNBC lamented shortly after Facebook announced its ban of Infowars that Facebook cannot completely clamp down on accounts, essentially playing “whack-a-mole.” CNBC reported:
It’s yet another sign that while huge companies such as Facebook and YouTube have to fight to keep content under control, it’s tough for both to monitor and remove accounts and content that can pop right back up with new pages. It’s like a big game of whack-a-mole.
Censorship is ramping up around the world as mainstream news outlets rally for “regulations” on the first amendment.
While anti-establishment voices are silenced, technological advancements are being made that will bring “fake news” to a whole new level.
Artificial Intelligence systems are currently being developed that will “deep fake” news articles, just as photos and videos have been infamously faked.
In a little-noticed story in July of 2017, it was revealed that a Google grant of €706,000 was given to the United Kingdom’s Press Association to use artificial intelligence to write news articles.
The A.I. system, called RADAR (Reporters And Data And Robots), comes from Google’s Digital News Initiative.
As reported by the Guardian, RADAR will “…auto-generate graphics, video and pictures to add to stories.”
POYNTER ‘BLACKLIST’ OF CONSERVATIVE NEWS SITES WAS CREATED BY SPLC EMPLOYEE
List contains sites such as Free Beacon, Daily Caller, Breitbart
By Joe Schoffstall
A journalism institute released a “blacklist” of media outlets they deemed as “unreliable” that was created by an employee of the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center and overwhelmingly contains conservative new media outlets.
The Poynter Institute for Media Studies, a Florida-based nonprofit journalism school, released the list on Wednesday and declared dozens of mainstream conservative sites such as the Washington Free Beacon, Daily Caller, Daily Signal, CNS News, and Breitbart as “unreliable” while listing few liberal sites,” Newsbusters reports.
The study notes it trimmed the list “by removing several sites whose stories, though highly politicized, were mostly not fake: alternet.org, cato.org, heritage.org, nationalreview.com, thedailybeast.com, the intercept.com, thinkprogress.org, and weeklystandard.com.”
A majority of the removed sites lean left. Of the removed conservative sites, the Heritage Foundation, a think tank – and not in itself a news site — was taken off the list. However, the Daily Signal, which is hosted by the Heritage Foundation, is included on the list. Another conservative site that was removed from the list, the Weekly Standard, was shuttered in December.
While most of the sites are labeled as “unreliable”, “fake”, or “conspiracy” – or a combination of the three — the Free Beacon is listed as “bias”, a label that prompted further review of the sites that were ultimately removed from the list upon further review and before its release.
Barrett Golding, an employee at the Southern Poverty Law Center, a far-left nonprofit embroiled in controversy over accusations of internal racism from its top management that led to its co-founder, Morris Dees, and president, Richard Cohen, being ousted from the group, created the list for Poynter.
Golding appears to have followed the SPLC “list” model in its creation of “unreliable” news sites, as many of the mainstream conservative sites on the list are thrown in with actual sites that push conspiracy theories. This mirrors the SPLC’s “hate group” list, which contains mainstream conservative organizations alongside racist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan. The SPLC’s “hate” list, which it is perhaps best known for today, has helped the controversial — and allegedly internally racist group itself towards its black employees – to garner more than $500 million in total assets, $120 million of which is parked overseas.
“These sites stood next to conservative organizations like Alliance Defending Freedom, which represented baker Jack Phillips in the Supreme Court case Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission,” Newsbusters writes. “While the ADF is not a news site, it was likely targeted because Golding works for the SPLC. The ADF is considered a ‘hate group’ by the SPLC and is marked on the ‘hate map.’ The Washington Post even questioned SPLC’s ‘political activism’ and ‘bias.'”
“SPLC has been dropped by Twitter from its Trust and Safety Council and slammed by the mainstream media after multiple scandals rocked the organization. Its hate map even helped shooter Floyd Lee Corkins find the location of the Family Research Council, where he shot and wounded five people.”
Factcheck.org, Fake News Codex, OpenSources, and PolitiFact were also involved in the study alongside Golding.
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