WHO NEEDS RUSSIAN INTERVENTION IN THE ELECTION, WHEN TWITTER AND FACEBOOK DO IT SO WELL?

The war for freedom of speech has already begun

 

By Gilad Zwick 

 

Israel Hayom

October 21, 2020

 

Last July, on these pages, I wrote an article positing that "the elites in Silicon Valley want to 'atone' for the popularity their platforms have garnered among right-wing elements by sabotaging Trump's presidential campaign."

Since that time, Facebook and Twitter have chosen to double down against Trump voters, recently taking steps that would even make Willi Münzenberg – chief propagandist for Lenin and the communists – blush with pride.

"Who needs 'Russian intervention' in the election, when Twitter and Facebook do it so well?" former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee recently pondered.

Huckabee was referring to Twitter and Facebook's violent censorship of a chain of New York Post revelations about the millions of dollars channeled from Ukraine, Russia and China straight into the pockets of Hunter Biden, the son of Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden, during his time as vice president in the Obama administration. Some of the deals were conceived shortly after Hunter joined his father on official visits to China, aboard the vice president's plane, Air Force 2.

Biden himself isn't claiming the emails published by the Post are fake, but that hasn't stopped US media outlets from labeling them a "Russian disinformation campaign." Former Israeli consul in New York, Alon Pinkas, echoed the claim in Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth – but US Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe clarified this was a lie: "Hunter Biden's laptop computer is not part of a Russian disinformation campaign," he stated.

Twitter said it censored the information because it was obtained via a "hack," but not only is this claim wrong, it is also rife with hypocrisy. Indeed, just recently the social media giant disseminated a New York Times story on its platform about Trump's tax returns – even though the source of that information absolutely committed a crime to obtain it.

"We have documents, not rumors," said New York Post editor-in-chief Stephen Lynch. "According to Twitter's new rule, even the documents that led to Nixon's resignation over the Watergate scandal wouldn't have seen the light of day. This is a policy that will lead to journalistic bankruptcy."

Lynch is well aware that Twitter won't censor every article with a confidential source – just those that contradict the agenda of its senior management and employees. It was recently revealed that over 90% of political donations from Facebook and Twitter employees go to the Democratic Party – a sum total of nearly $2.75 million. Meanwhile, Twitter's employees have donated a mere $3,556 to Republicans.

On Tuesday, Project Veritas, an independent-conservative news outlet in the US, reported that Google executives also lied under oath to Congress by claiming the company isn't politically biased: "There's an ultra-leftist attitude" at Google, a technical program manager for Google's cloud service was caught on hidden camera telling Project Veritas.

"You are just plain and simple trying to play God," he said, referring to the platform's search algorithms skewed toward positive coverage of Biden and negative coverage of Trump. "When Trump won the first time, people were crying in the corridors at Google. There were protests, there were marches. There were like, I guess, group therapy sessions for employees; organized by HR [Human Resources]," he added.

Senior officials on the American left are already preparing for the day after – if Biden defeats Trump. Robert Reich, Obama's former labor secretary, has already created the "Truth and Reconciliation Commission," along the lines of South Africa following the fall of the Apartheid regime, to "erase Trump's lies, comfort those who have been harmed by his hatefulness, and name every official, politician, executive, and media mogul whose greed and cowardice enabled this catastrophe."

The significance is clear: Once the unelected elites – the clerks, jurists, legacy media and Silicon Valley executives are in perfect synergy with the White House and Congress, members of the right will be persecuted not on the basis of their actions, but their views.

Anyone who thinks this phenomenon is unique to the United States is invited to peruse the Wikipedia pages for Netanyahu prosecutor Liat Ben-Ari, retired Brig. Gen. Amir Haskel and Attorney General Avichai Mendelblit. Hint: You won't find any mention of construction violations, racist comments, or, until recently, grabbing someone by the throat. All these have been censored by "editors" who decided they were "marginal incidents," which are, of course, prominently featured if the transgressor is from the Right. Anyone who had dared come out against this hypocrisy has been blocked and silenced. The war for freedom of expression isn't just a gloomy prospect, it's already upon us.