Kerby Anderson

The congressional hearings with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg mostly focused on data collection and privacy. Fortunately, Senator Ted Cruz also raised important questions about what he called a “pervasive pattern of bias and political censorship.” And Senator Ben Sasse said he thought “America might be better off not being policed by one company that has a really big and powerful platform.” He even asked the founder if he could “define hate speech.” It turns out that censorship by Facebook is more than just incidental. And the problem of censorship is more pervasive. All the big tech companies engage in censorship. Here are just a few examples. Facebook shut down the “Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day page and has blocked a post by Fox News reporter Todd Starnes. Apparently, over two-dozen Catholic pages have been blocked. Of course, the most recent example was the decision by Facebook about the African-American ladies, known as Diamond and Silk, who Facebook considered “unsafe for the community.” Lots of people have had Twitter pull down their comments. For example, Representative Marsha Blackburn was blocked on Twitter because of her statement that said: “I fought Planned Parenthood, and we stopped the sale of baby body parts.” Twitter shut down her video campaign ad, claiming it was “inflammatory and negative.” Speaking of videos, there has been lots of censorship at YouTube. Videos by pro-life groups have been removed. Dennis Prager and Prager University filed a lawsuit to stop YouTube from censoring its videos. A California federal judge dismissed the complaint. And in previous commentaries, I have talked about how Apple removed Chuck Colson’s Manhattan Declaration from its iTunes App Store. There are other religious apps that have also been removed. Each of these big tech giants portray themselves as a neutral public forum. There is growing evidence of their bias and censorship.