The New York Times has published an article expressing its concerns that Big Tech platforms like Facebook and Twitter aren’t doing enough to censor “misinformation” in the run-up to the midterm elections.
The article complains that Meta (Facebook) has slashed its ‘election misinformation’ team from 300 people during 2020 to just 60 people and that Mark Zuckerberg no longer meets with the team directly.
Civil rights groups are also apparently upset that Zuckerberg is less interested in communicating with them about efforts to stop ‘election misinformation’.
According to the piece, Twitter is also likely to be less censorious towards election information due to the likelihood that it is about to be purchased by Elon Musk.
“I’m concerned,” President of the NAACP Derrick Johnson told the newspaper. “It appears to be out of sight, out of mind.”
Noting that there are numerous political candidates running for office in 2022 who agree with Donald Trump that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, the Times laments that Meta’s reduction in censorship “could have far-reaching consequences as faith in the U.S. electoral system reaches a brittle point.”
The article also whines about the viral success of Dinesh D’Souza’s documentary ‘2000 Mules’, which received over a million views on the alternative video hosting platform Rumble and also received 430,000 “interactions” on Facebook, proof according to the newspaper that election misinformation is “rampant” online.
Representatives from both Facebook and Twitter responded by assuring the Times that they are still keenly focused on censoring election “misinformation.”
“Before the 2020 US presidential election, Big Tech platforms deployed unprecedented levels of censorship by censoring then-President Donald Trump numerous times, banning popular pro-Trump groups, and more,” writes Reclaim the Net.
“Post-election, this mass censorship continued with President Trump being permanently banned by all the major tech platforms, discussions of “widespread fraud or errors” changing the 2020 US presidential election outcome being banned, free speech platform Parler (which many users had flocked to in an attempt to escape Big Tech’s censorship) being de-platformed by the tech giants, and more.”
“The mainstream media and Big Tech used the vague, subjective term “election misinformation” to justify this silencing of a sitting US President and the mass censorship of election-related speech.
The legacy media is once again likely to weaponize hyper-partisan ‘fact-checkers to ensure that information that isn’t completely censored is at least shadow banned and relegated by algorithms so fewer Americans will see it.
