Big Tech companies are outsourcing censorship through dishonest “fact check” firms, according to co-founder of the Federalist, Sean Davis.
Davis noted that many of the so-called third-party fact-checkers are based overseas and are run by “college kids” who have the power to “shut down information” under the pretense of trying to stop the spread of false information.
As a consequence, the so-called fact-checking campaigns and censoring serve as nothing more than an “attempt to suppress narratives that are inconvenient to Big Tech.”
“So it’s actually a really kind of an Orwellian system and it’s based on the conceit that these big tech social media publishers are not publishers, because under the law, they have to pretend to be neutral third-party platforms, the way the courts have interpreted it, that gives them all kinds of ‘get out of jail free’ cards,” Davis said.
“And so what they do is, instead of censoring on their own, and taking it upon themselves, they‘ll hire outside third-party fact-checkers, and they’ll say: ‘hey, you’re independent.’ And we’re just going to have you fact-check these articles that are going viral.
“And if you decide that they’re false, under the terms and guidelines we give you, then what we’re going to do is we’re going make sure people don’t see those articles anymore. So it’s a way of outsourcing censorship, and pretending that Big Tech is not doing the censorship themselves, when functionally, they’re the ones running the entire censorship campaign.”
Davis also said there are a number of news organizations that do fact-checking, which can have disastrous effects by allowing them to effectively de-platform and censor their competitors.
“So you can have a news organization that doesn’t like one of its competitors can go and write a fact check claiming its competitors’ articles are false, even if they’re not. And the result will be that that competitors’ articles are either removed from the site not allowed to be posted, or when people post them they don’t actually show up in news feeds.
“Another type of organization that they use are these companies with no vintage whatsoever. They seem to have materialized from thin air. They don’t have any journalists there or any real reporters. In some instances we found they are based overseas, they have college kids running them.
“And you’re putting in these people’s hands the power to shut down dissent, to shut down information, all under the guise of trying to stop disinformation.”
A cybersecurity expert authenticated one email that indicated Vadym Pozharskyi, a top executive from the Ukrainian gas firm Burisma, met with Joe Biden while in Washington in 2015. Joe Biden was vice president at the time and Hunter Biden served on the board of Burisma.
Davis said, “And so this person who owns the shop had this laptop for who knows how long and had the receipt which had Hunter Biden’s signature saying, ’these are all the terms that I agree to,' and the media ended up getting a hold of that, specifically the New York Post, and what did Big Tech do?
“They came in at the urging of a lot of left-wing politicians and said: ‘No, that’s disinformation, we’re not gonna let you post that.’ So you had legitimate journalism, where you could see all of the receipts, it was clear the exact chain of custody for this information, you had that being shut down about the president’s son and about his ties to foreign governments in the middle of an election.”
Davis added that the situation is “really scary” and that we are seeing the government outsourcing its censorship, which he called an “abridgement of free speech to these big monopolistic tech oligarchs.”
“It’s a really, really scary time because when you see the melding of government and corporate power used to shut down citizens, nothing good happens once that once you get started down that road,” Davis said.
The former economic policy adviser to Gov. Rick Perry added that Section 230 protections that shield internet platforms from liability serve as a “get out of jail free card” for big tech companies and work in contradiction to the First Amendment allowing for freedom of speech and freedom of press.
David continued, “And that’s the whole point of this totalitarian agenda is you want to eliminate anything, reality or not, that is an obstacle to you getting complete control over people, and that’s what’s happening with Big Tech and their censorship. The way they control search results, the way they fact check deep platform people, they’re trying to make it impossible to support or say anything that’s contrary to whatever the ruling classes particular agenda and narrative is at that time.”
