In the competition of ideas, you can’t win the game if you’re not on the playing field.
That’s why Silicon Valley bigwigs’ stubborn refusal to put business above their own personal partisan biases doesn’t just rankle. It reeks. Equal access to social media is not just about sharing food pics, pet videos, makeup tutorials and travelogues. It’s about ensuring the ability to disseminate and distribute political speech on the world’s biggest platforms.
Although I started in the metro newspaper industry in 1992, my years as an independent conservative blogger and internet entrepreneur have been the most journalistically enriching. I launched my first website in 1999, my namesake blog in 2004, my first group blog and video content platform HotAir.com and my YouTube channel in 2006 (where I broadcast reports from Iraq), my Twitter account in 2008, my second group website Twitchy.com in 2012, and my documentary-style web series, “Michelle Malkin Investigates,” for CRTV.com in 2016. I don’t just preach the First Amendment. I practice it for a living.
Over the years, I’ve joined other independent conservative social media users in exposing coordinated “flag-spamming” campaigns against right-wing personalities and causes. Pro-life, pro-border security and anti-jihadist journalists and activists have all been selectively gagged on Google/YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. I’ve worked with a few good-faith employees at these companies who tried to treat conservatives fairly. But in the unhinged era of the anti-Trump resistance, intermittent purges, “accidental” suspensions and suspicious deletions of conservative content have spiked to a level of systemic censorship.
Twelve years after its founding, Twitter has abandoned its corporate motto of “Defend and respect the user’s voice.” Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, set to testify before Congress in two weeks, admitted his company’s left-wing bias and dismissed revelations from his own engineers, who confided to undercover Project Veritas journalists that they were creating algorithms to “ban a way of talking,” “down rank” users based on politics and employ “machine learning” to create special triggers and keywords — “the majority of (which) are for Republicans.”
In April, the brilliant anti-leftist street artist Sabo disappeared from Twitter without warning or explanation.
Prager University, with whom I collaborated on a new video about immigration and border security, has been suppressed on Facebook and it’s clear it was no accidental glitch. One of the videos yanked was conservative millennial vlogger and CRTV.com host Allie Stuckey’s piece called “Make Men Masculine Again.”
My friend and conservative social media guru Nick Short, of the Security Studies Group, was one of thousands of conservative activists who discovered they’ve been throttled by Twitter’s use of a “complex and opaque Quality Filter algorithm that has the effect of disproportionately restricting the voices of conservatives under the guise of limiting harmful or abusive users.”
Same as it ever was. For three decades, the far-left has waged continuous war on conservative free speech in every available space.
They have organized militant boycott campaigns against the right’s most effective advocates on talk radio — including Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage and Laura Ingraham. They pressured advertisers to withdraw from Dr. Laura Schlessinger’s national TV show when she was at the height of her popularity and mainstream commercial success.
The “new” war on conservatives on the internet is the same old attempt by desperate liberals to shut down their competitors in the marketplace of ideas. The right-wing solution is not to lie down, but to win over more converts, find new ways to disseminate our news and views and turn up the heat. Speak for those who have no voice. Support those speaking for you.
Michelle Malkin is host of “Michelle Malkin Investigates” on CRTV.com.
