Exclusive: Joseph Farah on Big Tech’s ongoing, limitless manipulation of public opinion
by Joseph Farah, World Net Daily
For more than a year, I’ve been explaining patiently and relentlessly to all who would listen how and why Google and Facebook pose existential threats to American freedom – from speech, to press, to religion, to privacy, to elections.
Most people still do not get it.
They don’t understand how close these powerful Big Tech companies are moving America – slowly, surely and deliberately – toward a Big Brother nightmare world devoid of the values that guard our uniquely free institutions.
Here’s a primer on why these two companies, along with others like Apple, Amazon, YouTube and Twitter, must be broken up through anti-trust actions, stripped of their inexcusable protections against consumer liability, stopped from invading the privacy of Americans for profit, blocked from using the most intimate personal data to inject extreme bias into the national debate, and rigging elections.
Furthermore, and most important, they need to be stopped from blocking, banning and blacklisting legitimate political speech, imposing speech codes, enforcing “political correctness” standards in either content or advertising sales or punishing opinions with which they disagree.
Under no circumstances should these corporations be permitted to engage in political lobbying, soliciting, accepting government contracts or participating in any political activities, operating as they currently do under special government protections against liability claims.
By law, Google-Facebook must be ideologically neutral in all they do, since, under the law, they are not “publishers” but “carriers” of information. But there’s a big problem with that claim, given their financial support and “partnership” claims on content with the Southern Poverty Law Center – a far-left activist group whose main occupation is labeling conservative and Christian individuals, companies and organizations as “hate groups.” The SPLC partners not only with Google and Facebook, but also Twitter, Amazon and Apple.
“In recent years, the far-Left Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has faced a slew of lawsuits regarding its deceptive practice of branding mainstream conservative and Christian groups ‘hate groups’ on par with the Ku Klux Klan,” reported PJ Media recently. “Google has decided to partner with the SPLC, even encouraging employees to work for the organization. Conservative lawyers told PJ Media this partnership may make the tech giant vulnerable to defamation and racketeering lawsuits.”
Indeed, the most dangerous and well-funded “hate group” in America could well be the SPLC.
While Google and Facebook clearly demonstrate their leftist leanings daily through their bias evident in the news and information they display, their partnerships with SPLC make a mockery of their legal claims to neutrality.
The U.S. Justice Department should immediately begin an investigation of the Google-Facebook-YouTube-Amazon-Twitter-Apple axis of evil. Such relationships by the most powerful media organizations in the world clearly defy U.S. law.
“It does appear that there’s more than funding that is taking place between Google and the SPLC and other tech companies, to the point where there’s interaction, potentially plotting, and the involvement of their so-called ‘hate group’ label that is designed for one reason – to destroy the opposition based on ideology,” Mat Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, told PJ Media. “It’s plausible,” he said, that Google may face RICO and defamation charges in future lawsuits.
Robert Epstein, a Ph.D. psychologist who focuses on search engine manipulation, warned that Google’s attempts to manipulate public opinion are more terrifying than the Chinese government’s attempts to control its citizens.
“To me, [China’s manipulation] is scary, but people are aware of it,” he told PJ Media. “It’s done openly by the government. I think what is happening elsewhere in the world that’s being driven mostly by Google I think is much more dangerous, because it’s mostly invisible,” said Epstein, whose research features prominently in the recent film, “The Creepy Line.”
“The Creepy Line” is an excellent documentary exposé that covers much of the substance of this report.
“There’s no transparency, there’s no accountability,” Epstein added. “It’s a more ambitious kind of surveillance than that of the Chinese government.”
Epstein says he is certain Google employed elements of its ability to change its users’ opinions on whom to vote for in the 2018 midterm election – thus potentially affecting control of the House of Representatives. His research also suggests it is possible for Google to select the winner of the 2020 presidential election – without detection.
A Hillary Clinton supporter in the 2016 election, Epstein says his research suggests Google’s demonstrable pro-Democrat activism in that race explains most of her vote lead in the popular vote.
Epstein says Google has “enormous power to shift opinions and votes, but they’re aware that they have the power, they talk about using the power, and my own data suggests that they do in fact use the power.”
Epstein argued that bias impacts algorithms, even without a conscious attempt to influence people.
“There is solid research showing that programmers have a bias of some sort; that bias ends up getting expressed in their code unconsciously,” he said. “Even without deliberateness, we still will end up with algorithms that have biases embedded in them.”
However, Epstein adds: “We know that the bias is explicit. We know that. It’s impossible for me to believe that Google executives and employees are not deliberate in their manipulations.”
For two years, America has watched Special Counsel Robert Mueller investigate the way Russia supposedly conspired with Donald Trump to change the outcome of the U.S. election in 2016.
With an unlimited budget and unlimited time and the full resources of the FBI at his disposal, Mueller has failed to find any persuasive evidence. Yet, under our noses, a conspiracy much more real, much more dangerous and much more capable of influencing elections is carrying out a plot much more diabolical, one that threatens to unhinge America from its constitutional moorings and its anchor in the will of the people.
It’s time to stand up to this imminent and existential threat to free speech, the free press, freedom of religion, the right to privacy, American sovereignty, and free and fair elections.
Indeed, there’s not much time left.
