Conservative censorship exists in tech, but government regulation is not the answer: Media group president
District Media Group President and founder Beverly Hallberg discusses Big Tech censorship, The Babylon Bee, and the role of consumers in bringing about change in social media.
The Babylon Bee, a satirical conservative website, was locked out of its Twitter account last week after the tech company accused the Bee of violating its rules against "hateful content" for a post jokingly naming Biden administration official Dr. Rachel Levine the Bee’s 2022 "Man of the Year." Dr. Levine is a transgender woman. Twitter said the site would retain access to the account if the tweet was deleted. CEO Seth Dillon has said the site will do no such thing.
A day later, New York Times "Sway" podcast host Kara Swisher asserted there was "no evidence" of political bias against conservatives occurring on social media platforms, a claim reiterated frequently by Democratic lawmakers and liberal media personalities.
Speaking with Fox News Digital, Fox News contributor and "The Federalist" editor-in-chief Mollie Hemingway said the notion that censorship hits both political parties equally simply because a few conservative outlets are allowed to exist on social media platforms is "gaslighting in the extreme."
"You can not possibly have been alive in the last five years and think that social media companies do anything other than amplify left-wing insanity and crush anything from the right that hurts the left," she added.
The debate around the possible injection of political bias into Big Tech company policies has persisted for years, as has the discussion on free speech, Silicon Valley's constantly fluctuating and often vague content moderation policies, attempts to curb "misinformation," and the rights of a company to operate its business how it sees fit versus the importance of public discourse in an increasingly virtual world.
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Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey testifies remotely during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on censorship Nov. 17, 2020, in Washington. (Bill Clark-Pool/Getty Images)
A pattern has emerged of right-leaning voices being censored far more often than those on the left.
In a recent example, Rep. Vicky Hartzler, a Republican Senate candidate from Missouri, was suspended from Twitter in February after tweeting about transgender women in sports.
"Women’s sports are for women, not men pretending to be women," she tweeted Monday afternoon from her campaign account. Twitter notified Hartzler she had violated the company’s rules against "hateful content" and would reinstate her account only if she deleted the tweet.
A deputy to Spain's far-right Vox Party, Francisco José Contreras, was locked out of his Twitter account for 12 hours for that same "hateful content" policy in May 2021 after stating that "a man cannot get pregnant" because men have "no uterus or eggs."
District Media Group president Beverly Hallberg said she gave the Babylon Bee credit for standing by its perspective in the face of Twitter cracking down on the transgender issue, only allowing certain opinions to post unfettered.
"They're targeting specific issues … They're going to be censoring opinions based on what Twitter deems appropriate," she told Fox News Digital.
Jon Schweppe, a policy director at the think tank American Principles Project (APP), tweeted in December: "Now we hope that governors will likewise be emboldened to continue the fight against the evil gender ideology being forced on America's children by joining Arkansas and Tennessee in banning the chemical castration and surgical mutilation of minors suffering from gender dysphoria."
He was subsequently temporarily suspended from Twitter for violating their commonly broken policy against "hateful content." Schweppe appealed his suspension, arguing that he was "advocating for the protection of children from violence." Twitter rejected his appeal.
The Chalkboard Review, an education group that opposes critical race theory was suspended on Twitter but eventually restored at the beginning of February. Twitter originally indicated the account was permanently suspended for breaking their "ban evasion" rules.
National Education Association (NEA) official Emilie McKiernan said on Twitter that she had reported the account and posted a screenshot of Twitter responding to her report. The teachers union had previously written a letter to social media platforms, urging them to "help put an end" to "propaganda fueling violence" against educators. Liberal media companies and Democrats have in the past supported the concept of CRT and or denied its existence in K-12 schools, something Republicans have widely disputed.
mRNA vaccine platform inventor Dr. Robert Malone was permanently banned from Twitter in December 2021 for reportedly violating its COVID-19 misinformation policy. The platform refused to specify which tweet was a violation.
On New Year’s Eve, podcast host Joe Rogan posted an interview with Malone discussing a theory known as "mass formation psychosis," coined by Professor Mattias Desmet. The video was quickly removed from YouTube. Malone said that he believed Google also altered search engine results related to the interview.
Twitter headquarters in San Francisco, California, on Oct. 27, 2021. (Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Twitter also permanently banned Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s personal Twitter account for violating the tech giant’s "COVID-19 misinformation policy." Twitter did not specify which specific tweets had led to the violation, but Greene has previously been suspended from Twitter in August 2021 after tweeting that vaccines were "failing" and did not reduce the spread of the virus.
The media company Grabien was suspended for the same "COVID-19 misinformation policy" after quoting Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., when he spoke out on COVID-19 treatments.
"Rep. Biggs: Big Pharma Won’t Consider Therapeutics like HCQ or Ivermectin Because of Economic Interests," the tweet by Grabien founder Tom Elliott read, also linking to a video of the congressman’s comments.
In February 2021, Twitter permanently suspended the account of right-wing exposé news outlet Project Veritas for "repeated violations" of the company’s "private information policy." The suspension came soon after the account shared a video showing journalist Christian Hartsock approaching Facebook exec Guy Rosen about remarks he made in a video conference leaked to Veritas. Rosen said in the leaked video that the tech company has a "system" of being able to "freeze commenting" on threads and accounts flagged for hate speech violations.
Months later, Project Veritas’ founder James O’Keefe was permanently banned from his personal account after Twitter alleged he had operated "fake accounts." Twitter’s actions against Project Veritas came the same week it launched a series reporting on CNN, although it's unclear if there was any link.
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In perhaps the two most infamous example of the power wielded by Big Tech platforms, companies widely banned then-President Donald Trump from the platform and suppressed a story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, just weeks before Biden defeated Trump in the 2020 election.
Twitter announced the permanent suspension of then-President Trump’s account in January 2021, following months of the company flagging his tweets with notes to users. Twitter asserted that many of the tweets connected to the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, were inflammatory and promoted violence.
That month, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts would be blocked "indefinitely," and for at least the next two weeks before Inauguration Day. His account was never reinstated, and was subsequently banned for two years by an Oversight Board created to review Facebook policy.
In a 2019 interview with Fox News’ Dana Perino, Zuckerberg pushed back on then California Sen. Kamala Harris’ comments urging social media companies to shut down Trump’s accounts.
"I generally believe that as a principle, people should decide what is credible and what they want to believe, who they want to vote for," he said. "And I don’t think that should be something that we want tech companies or any kind of company doing."
He went on to say the company needed to do "significant work" to satisfy the concerns of conservatives over alleged bias, but argued that conservative media platforms do "quite well" on Facebook.
Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg speaking with Fox News' Dana Perino in 2019.
Trump was also permanently suspended from Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube.
On Oct. 14 2020, in the weeks leading up the presidential election, The New York Post, one of America’s oldest newspapers, published emails recovered from a laptop belonging to 2020 Democratic nominee Joe Biden's son, Hunter.
Former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, as well as Trump’s re-election campaign’s official Twitter account, were locked out of their accounts on Twitter after attempting to share the link to the story.
It was then discovered that links to the story had been blocked by Twitter and users could not share it on the platform. The story, according to the tech giant, was in violation of its "hacked materials policy." The newspaper's account was also banned until they complied with Twitter to delete tweets related to the laptop.
The company’s former CEO, Jack Dorsey, eventually acknowledged that the blocking of URLS for the story were "wrong" and had updated company policy to fix the issue.
Facebook confirmed to Fox News that human moderators chose to temporarily limit distribution of the New York Post's story across the platform.
Twitter declared access to a free and open Internet to be "an essential human right in modern society" last June after the Nigerian government banned access to the social media platform even while critics say the company censors conservative content and bans its own users on a daily basis.
Both Democrats and Republicans alike have pushed for steps to be taken to reign in the enormous power wielded by Big Tech companies.
Disagreements remain on how such measures should be taken. Calls to repeal Section 230, break up the tech companies, or police their actions through the creation of a government advisory board have all cropped up. Yet, critics have argued that government intervention could lead to censorship against political opponents and everyday Americans by the party in power.
"If we do have competition … why would we want government to step in?" Hallberg said, noting some Republicans want more regulation of Big Tech. "I would argue we want less government within Big Tech, not more … I'm always in favor of consumer choice. I think customers know better than government as to what they're actually looking for."
Digital strategist Bret Jacobson told Fox News Digital that concerns related to tech censorship should be addressed by consumers rather than "Draconian" and "unwise" government attempts to control what users see and hear.
"It has to be a monumentally bad idea that both Democrats and Republicans can agree on when trying to control U.S. citizens' speech. It's not a good sign any time politicians are leaping towards censorship," said Jacobson.
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He added that lawmakers are oftentimes already "missing the changing tech marketplace," noting that politicians frequently harp on Facebook when most young people, who dominate the user-base, have already moved to alternatives such as TikTok and Snapchat.