GOP to Silicon Valley: Promote the Far Right or Else
GOP to Silicon Valley: Promote the Far Right or Else
Several members of the powerful House Judiciary Committee are threatening to regulate tech companies if they don’t promote conservative content to their satisfaction.
Matt LasloMatt Laslo
07.23.18 4:58 AM ET
https://www.thedailybeast.com/gop-to-silicon-valley-promote-the-far-right-or-else?ref=home
When an average American’s social-media posts don’t go viral, it’s often understood the problem is with the content. But when that happens to a conservative pundit, it’s a left-wing conspiracy, at least according to a growing number of Republicans in the House.
Several vocal lawmakers on the powerful House Judiciary Committee are threatening to clamp down on Silicon Valley unless companies like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube can prove they’re treating conservative—even the alt-right trolls—content the same as they treat liberal, progressive, and mainstream material.
While traditional GOP orthodoxy rejects regulation out of hand, not to mention that this Congress has been the most anti-regulation in recent memory, these lawmakers are flipping that script on its head when it comes to what they see as an assault on conservative talking heads.
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King argues these big tech firms are, like his Democratic colleagues—and unlike himself, of course—blinded by their ideologies.
“When I talk to leftists, they really just, some of them just do not have, even though they’ve got a lot of cognitive ability, they’re wired so differently that they can’t rationally put themselves in the mind-set of a conservative,” King lectured just off the House floor. “So, therefore, their reasoning ability just doesn’t have the circuits to make an objective judgement.”
Conservatives like King point to what they say was unfair censoring of Trump fanatics Diamond and Silk, when Google algorithms linked the California GOP to Nazis and the likes of Gateway Pundit. That site regularly peddles conspiracy theories as news, like when it accused Parkland, Florida, shooting survivors of being paid actors, or even Pizzagate, which lead to a family-friendly restaurant in Washington, D.C. being shot up by a deranged conservative. Even so, King wants Gateway Pundit to be treated the same by Silicon Valley algorithms as the nation’s traditional publications.
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