Brent Bozell calls tech industry liberal bias 'the greatest threat to liberty in history'
A group of high-powered conservative media leaders gathered to strategize ways to combat liberal bias in the tech industry led by Media Research Center founder Brent Bozell.
A group of high-powered conservative media leaders gathered on Wednesday night to strategize ways to combat liberal bias in the tech industry, which Media Research Center founder Brent Bozell called “the most powerful force in history” when it comes to the far left's attempt at "remaking civilization."
“Conservatives are coming together, across a broad spectrum, of enterprises and joining forces to fight what some of us believe to be, potentially, the greatest threat to liberty in history,” Bozell said in an interview with Fox News. “I think we’re heading for an all-out war. As much as they like Kumbaya, this isn’t gonna be Kumbaya.”
“Conservatives are coming together, across a broad spectrum, of enterprises and joining forces to fight what some of us believe to be, potentially, the greatest threat to liberty in history... I think we’re heading for an all-out war."
Bozell dined with leaders from the Washington Times, The Federalist, The Daily Signal, LifeSite News, Breitbart, Regnery Publishing, Prager U, Sinclair Broadcasting, The Heritage Foundation and others to discuss what they say is a left-wing bias among billionaire tech titans who are using their power to “push a political agenda," with Google, Facebook, Twitter and Google-owned YouTube being their primary targets.
“Google is potentially the most dangerous because of the power it has with its search engine,” Bozell said. “You’ve also got service companies that are getting into the act, whether it’s PayPal or Microsoft or numerous others, they’re now starting to either flat-out censor… or demonize conservative online publications.”
As for Twitter, Bozell said it has a global group of influencers who are able to spout their messages, while people with beliefs that don’t coincide with the company’s agenda are often muted. He said users are forced to abide by “speech control,” which gets to be “Orwellian after a while” because a ruler is essentially telling you what rhetoric is acceptable.
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“That starts getting very eerie,” Bozell added. “Especially when you’re looking at this being worldwide, not just this country, it’s worldwide.”
Media Research Center founder Brent Bozell is ready to fight back against tech giants. (FNC)
The meeting was the second gathering of the group, and more are being planned. Bozell said that Silicon Valley leaders always want to discuss ways to improve the situation but never actually do anything about it – so the conservative media leaders are committed to taking action.
The group plans to meet with Capitol Hill leaders at an upcoming gathering in order to finalize its strategy. Everything from legal action, anti-trust measures, competing platforms, and government regulations are on the table. Bozell feels that people on the left are also concerned with the power of these tech goliaths and is hopeful that eventually, it becomes a nonpartisan issue, leading to a multifaceted effort combat bias of all forms.
“Some of us have been cognizant of this emerging threat from the beginning,” Bozell said. “Only recently has everyone started realizing how big this problem is and how existentially necessary it is to fight them. Everyone is in agreement that it’s an all-hands on deck situation for freedom."
President Trump on Tuesday morning to attacked Twitter, Facebook and Google, saying the companies are "on the side of the Radical Left Democrats." It's unclear what Trump was specifically referencing, but the three tech companies, which have a combined market cap of over $1.3 trillion, have come under fire in recent weeks from legislators and media members.
California GOP Rep. Devin Nunes recently filed a major lawsuit seeking $250 million in compensatory damages and $350,000 in punitive damages against Twitter and a handful of its users, accusing the social media site of "shadow-banning conservatives" to secretly hide their posts, systematically censoring opposing viewpoints, and totally "ignoring" lawful complaints of repeated abusive behavior.
Last month, Twitter was sued by a Canadian blogger who says she was permanently banned from the platform for her tweets that referred to a transgender woman as “him.”
Twitter has consistently denied it "shadow bans" users, specifically writing a blog post in July 2018 that it does not shadow ban, a practice it describes as "deliberately making someone’s content undiscoverable to everyone except the person who posted it, unbeknownst to the original poster."
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Facebook recently apologized to Trump's social media director, Dan Scavino Jr., for temporarily restricting his account for a couple of hours due to automated bots on the platform – prompting the president to tweet "#StopTheBias."
The tech behemoths have also been accused of everything from attempting to influence elections to censoring conservative talking points. The same companies have come under fire for allowing controversial figures on the left, such as Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, to have a platform. In October, Twitter, told Fox News it would not suspend Farrakhan's account, despite posting a video with a caption that compared Jews to termites.
“It’s a concerted effort led by billionaires who have this extremist vision for remaking America… their communications vehicle is not The New York Times, it’s Facebook, Twitter, it’s these social media sites."
“It’s a concerted effort led by billionaires who have this extremist vision for remaking America… their communications vehicle is not The New York Times, it’s Facebook, Twitter, it’s these social media sites,” Bozell said. “Can anyone deny the dramatic change that’s occurred in this country in the past 10 years? Can anyone deny that has happened? This is not a coincidence and they are very, very successful… the world has suddenly gone upside down.”
Bozell said the group discussed who is responsible for the problem, what can be done to change things and why it happened in the first place.
“There are some many tentacles all over the place… it’s not an easy proposition to study why this is happening and what the end goal of the radical left is and how they’re trying to implement it,” Bozell said. “The question becomes, if we do nothing, if we’ve gone this far, this radically far in 10 years, if we do nothing, come 10 years from now where will we be? If that doesn’t scare somebody then nothing will."
Fox News’ Gregg Re, Chris Ciaccia and Stephen Sorace contributed to this report.
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