Silicon Valley Tightens Its Grip on Free Speech

Political totalitarianism is coming to America, and it is being ushered in not by government thugs in jackboots but by progressive activists and their allies in Silicon Valley.

(Article by Edmund Kozak republished from Lifezette.com)

In a chilling oped published in The New York Times on July 14, Lisa Feldman Barrett, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University, argued that so-called “hate speech” is the same thing as physical violence because it may possibly cause emotionally fragile individuals stress — and should be made illegal.

Thankfully, the First Amendment prohibits the federal government from following such advice, but online companies are taking it upon themselves to stamp-out so-called “hate speech,” strangling free speech and the free exchange of ideas in the process.

A number of troubling actions by internet companies — Google most prominent among them — are making it increasingly clear that some in Silicon Valley have proclaimed themselves defenders of the progressive, politically correct faith, and that those firms will silence any and all heretics who challenge those beliefs.

“Silicon Valley lives in a politically regressive, exclusive bubble. They are not aware of their own biases in how they talk, have a limited understanding of the philosophy behind free speech, and find it difficult empathizing with other points of view,” said Aaron Ginn, co-founder of the Lincoln Network, a think tank that seeks to promote libertarian ideas in the tech industry.

But Google not only has difficulty empathizing with other points of view — it is also actively trying to suppress them. Google recently made the controversial decision to fire engineer James Damore for authoring an internal memo questioning the company’s ideologically motivated diversity practices and highlighting sound scientific research suggesting that possible biological differences between men and women, not discrimination, could be a factor in the tech field’s high percentage of men.

In the aftermath of Damore’s firing, a number of anonymous current and former Google employees have come forward to reveal the full extent of the company’s efforts to silence right-wing voices. One anonymous employee identified as “Hal” told Breitbart News last week that some employees in Google’s ad sales department are “openly encouraging Adwords customers to pull their ads from Breitbart and Rebel Media.”

Another anonymous employee under the alias “Emmet” confirmed this with Breitbart News, and also revealed the existence of “efforts to demote anything non-PC, anti-Communist, and anti-Islamic terror from search results.”

“Emmett says he personally witnessed efforts from leftists within Google to bias YouTube’s algorithms to push anti-PC content off the platform’s ‘related videos’ recommendations,” Breitbart reported. “The software could just ‘astroturf’ your Related Videos section [an effort to hurt overall ratings], and you would be none the wiser,” said Emmet.

“Sure, if you know what to look for, perhaps you’d notice,” he continued. “But the vast majority of the viewership would never ever know. That’s the whole point of such a disinformation program, right? If you can tell it’s disinformation, you would never, ever believe it.”

People familiar with the process have told reporters recently that YouTube, a subsidiary of Google, is also laboring to cleanse its platform of alternative voices that challenge the mainstream liberal narrative. The social media video-sharing site has in the past few months systematically demonetized videos of right-wing commenters and journalists, such as Infowars editor-at-large Paul Joseph Watson and former Rebel Media reporter Lauren Southern.

Read more at: Lifezette.com

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