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WHY TWITTER HATES ME

In May 2016, Facebook was embroiled in that year’s second-biggest tech controversy. The first was my suspension from Twitter. But more about that in a bit.

Facebook had been caught in a lie: its “Trending News” feature, ostensibly designed to provide users with a list of the most popular topics being discussed on the platform that day, was being manipulated.

Despite heralding a new age of free, unfiltered information in its early days, the differences between new media and old media were not so great after all. Both were spoon-feeding information to their readers, deciding for the public what they should and shouldn’t see.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

In the early years of Facebook, the idea of an editor deciding what information you most needed to see was laughable. Equally, there was no algorithm deciding who saw what posts, when, and where. The system was simple: users followed other users, and saw a list of their posts, updated in real-time. Beyond the block button, there was no filtering. If your friend made a post at 6:15 PM, you saw it at 6:15 PM. The present system, where Facebook chooses what you see, when you see it, and how you see it, is a radical departure from its early, democratic ideals.

Facebook says their Trending list is meant to highlight “major events and meaningful conversations;” politically neutral metrics. But it’s not hard to predict what will happen when a company in one of the most progressive industries (tech), located in the most progressive city in America (San Francisco), trusts its staff (censors) to implement policies neutrally.

In May 2016, it was revealed that Facebook was discriminating against topics of interest to conservatives on its “Trending News” feature. A former employee of the team told Gizmodo that in addition to neglecting conservative trends, the company also suppressed stories about itself. And artificially promoted stories about the Black Lives Matter movement.²⁷

According to Gizmodo, Facebook’s team of “news curators” were:

…Told to select articles from a list of preferred media outlets that included sites like The New York Times, Time, Variety, and other liberal mainstream outlets. They would regularly avoid sites like World Star Hip Hop, The Blaze, and Breitbart, but were never explicitly told to suppress those outlets.”²⁸

A leaked document published in The Guardian later confirmed that Facebook would check against a list of preferred mainstream outlets (including BBC, New York Times, CNN and FOX) before assigning a story “national-level importance.”²⁹ In other words, it was up to places like CNN to sign off on stories from right-leaning outlets. Can anyone spot the problem?

Facebook’s policy of discrimination against conservatives wasn’t mandated from the top down, but it didn’t need to be. Silicon Valley companies don’t have to institute policies of bias against conservatives—all they have to do is give minimal oversight to their overwhelmingly left-leaning employees, and turn a blind eye to the inevitable consequences.

And that’s exactly what Facebook did. “We choose what’s trending,” a former employee told Gizmodo. “There was no real standard for measuring what qualified as news and what didn’t. It was up to the news curator to decide.”

The source told Gizmodo exactly what this meant for conservative news, and for progressive news. In short, the former was suppressed (“deep-sixed,” according to internal Facebook jargon) while the latter was promoted. Again, from Gizmodo:

Among the deep-sixed or suppressed topics on the list: former IRS official Lois Lerner, who was accused by Republicans of inappropriately scrutinizing conservative groups; Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker; popular conservative news aggregator the Drudge Report; Chris Kyle, the former Navy SEAL who was murdered in 2013; and former FOX News contributor Steven Crowder.

Meanwhile, according to the source, Facebook’s left-leaning staff pressured Mark Zuckerberg to use Facebook to help swing the election for Hillary Clinton, and blamed him for not doing enough after she lost.³⁰ And as for Blacks Lives Matter, “Facebook got a lot of pressure about not having a trending topic for Black Lives Matter,” the source said. “When we injected it, everyone started saying, ‘Yeah, now I’m seeing it as number one.’”

This particular injection is especially noteworthy because the #BlackLivesMatter movement originated on Facebook, and the ensuing media coverage of the movement often noted its powerful social media presence.

Facebook’s political bias scandal took place after Twitter’s, but unlike Twitter, Facebook actually matters to normal people, so it caused an instant response from politicians. A petition was created by the Republican National Committee, stating, “Facebook Must Answer For Conservative Censorship.”

Senator Jim Thune, then Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, also called on Facebook to explain itself: “If Facebook presents its Trending Topics section as the result of a neutral, objective algorithm but is in fact subjective,” wrote Thune, then “Facebook’s assertion that it maintains ‘a platform for people and perspectives from across the political spectrum’ misleads the public.”

Shocked by the response, Facebook leapt into action—they announced a whitewashing “internal report” (which of course found no wrongdoing at the company) and invited a bunch of establishment conservatives to a closed-door meeting at their Menlo Park headquarters.

Breitbart received an invitation to attend the meeting, but unlike S.E Cupp, Glenn Beck and other assorted establishment types, we declined to attend. The invitation was clearly only a photo op, and not a serious effort to engage with conservatives. Instead, I asked Mark Zuckerberg to answer, in a live debate with me, to the only group who mattered: the millions of conservatives who used his platform. He refused.

I’m a humble man—take a walk if you’re still laughing thirty seconds after reading that—I can handle not receiving attention, so my response to Facebook’s snub was characteristically gracious and mild. Along with Allum Bokhari, I wrote a series of stories exposing the wacky progressive views of Facebook’s Trending news team, leading to them all getting fired and replaced with a computer algorithm. You’re welcome, America.

Political activist Pamela Geller, who was banned from Facebook following the Muslim terrorist attack in Orlando, is also not letting the matter of Facebook’s bias stand. Geller is currently suing the company, and in an article for Breitbart, she explained why:

I am sick and tired of the suppression of our speech. We are unable to engage in the public square. And yes, Facebook is the public square; it’s where we connect. We have to fight for it. Shouting into the wilderness is not freedom of speech. My Facebook page has close to 300,000 followers, and combined with my pages (SIOA, SION, AFDI), the reach is another 100,000. It’s a critical connection.

Facebook has immense power over organic media—the sharing of our information and news between friends and associates. I would say too much power. They’re trying to change the people by restricting our access to information.³¹

Gun shop owners, immigration hawks, and admins of right-wing meme pages have also all faced censorship from Facebook.

Sadly, out of the leading web companies, Facebook is perhaps the best of the bunch. The impression I get from speaking to Facebook’s management behind closed doors is of a company trying desperately to rein in its own hyper-progressive employees. A report from The Wall Street Journal revealed that in the middle of the 2016 campaign, Mark Zuckerberg faced pressure from his community standards team to censor content from Donald Trump, whom they argued was engaging in “hate speech.” The team even threatened to quit if Trump wasn’t censored, but Zuckerberg reportedly held his ground.³²

Zuckerberg also stood fast when faced with pressure to remove Trump supporter Peter Thiel from Facebook’s board, releasing a statement in support of political diversity:

We care deeply about diversity. That’s easy to say when it means standing up for ideas you agree with. It’s a lot harder when it means standing up for the rights of people with different viewpoints to say what they care about.³³

This doesn’t make Zuckerberg special. Assuming this isn’t a deception (remember, he once called his own users “dumb fucks” for trusting him with their personal data), he’s doing the bare minimum of what we expect from social media companies—providing people with a platform to air their opinions, without letting his personal politics get in the way.

Facebook requires constant policing from the conservative media to keep the biases of their staff in check. On numerous occasions, wrongfully suspended accounts—like Pamela Geller’s—have only been reinstated following coverage from Breitbart. Facebook only took concerns over its Trending news team seriously after the conservative media got involved, and only fired them after Breitbart reported on their political biases.

GHOSTBUSTERS

“That trunk of humours, that bolting-hutch of beastliness, that swollen parcel of dropsies, that huge bombard of sack, that stuffed cloak-bag of guts, that roasted Manningtree ox with pudding in his belly, that reverend vice, that grey Iniquity, that father ruffian, that vanity in years.”

My love of Shakespeare has provided me with so many colorful ways to describe Twitter and its sandal-wearing, hobo-chic CEO Jack Dorsey.

Twitter’s stock has declined some 80% since 2014, and user growth has stalled since 2013. Karma and divine retribution are alive and well.

Once the most attention grabbing of the social media platforms, Twitter promised to usher in a new age of instant, democratic free expression. Its character limit encouraged users to share rapid-fire thoughts with the world, without a filter. In its early days, Twitter could justifiably claim it showed us what was on the world’s mind at any given moment.

And it was fun! It was fun to watch governments and politicians humbled in the face of the global citizenry’s un-moderated opinions. It was fun to engage in the raucous back-and-forth between liberals, conservatives and libertarians, on a platform which, for a while at least, was the opposite of a safe space. It could embarrass governments, kill officially mandated myths, and even topple dictators. It was dangerous. Naturally, I was a fan. My Twitter handle was @Nero, a nod to the Roman emperor known for his good looks, artistic soul, and for lighting his enemies on fire.

Twitter was about freedom, fun, and the humbling of authority. It was only a matter of time before progressive crybabies ruined everything. In late 2015, co-founder Jack Dorsey replaced relatively pro-free speech Dick Costolo as permanent CEO. Dorsey, a very close friend of DeRay Mckesson, had marched with Black Lives Matter in Ferguson, Missouri.³⁴ He quickly set about turning Twitter into a sharia-compliant conservative-free zone.

Like any CEO, Dorsey can’t admit his political bias openly. On the rare occasions when he does address the issue, he insists that the platform is politically neutral. In an interview with Today Show’s Matt Lauer, Dorsey flatly denied that Twitter censors anything other than threats of violence, insisting Twitter merely existed to “empower conversation.”

Two months after Dorsey became CEO, actor Adam Baldwin received a temporary suspension for a tweet implying that conservatives and libertarians were more sexually attractive than left-wingers. (An observation that has been repeatedly confirmed by surveys and studies.³⁵) The tweet broke none of Twitter’s rules, yet Baldwin was forced to delete it before his account was restored. This was at the same time angry death threats to Donald Trump were an unchecked daily occurrence. I knew it was only a matter of time before Dorsey came for me.

In October 2015, Fusion referred to me as “the internet’s biggest troll” with “terrifying allure.” They weren’t wrong. A few months later, Twitter removed my blue “verified” check mark. Not for any specific reason, they just saw how popular I was becoming and wanted to squash me. For this brave act, Huffington Post congratulated the platform for “standing up for women online.”³⁶ Ugh, please.

Verified checks are given out to prominent figures likely to be impersonated. I’m probably the most impersonated individual who isn’t Beyoncé, yet Twitter still took away my check mark, for ideological reasons. At the time, it was unprecedented.

I knew from that moment Twitter was looking for any excuse to ban me, and they would eventually find one. I also knew that when they succeeded, all hell would break loose. I wasn’t disappointed, although Twitter’s shareholders probably are now.

The pretext needed to ban me turned out to be the all-female reboot of Ghostbusters, a remarkably bad film that flopped at the box office and contributed to Sony’s decision to take a near $1 billion write-down on its movie business.³⁷ I published a catty review of the abominable flick, tarring it with my trademark reserve, as a crime against comedy. It is perhaps the only movie I’ve ever seen conceived entirely out of spite, which would have been okay, if it were funny. I castigated the abysmal performances from the lead actresses, including the inexplicably popular Leslie Jones.

The film had been attracting controversy for months before its release. When its trailer debuted on YouTube, it was immediately assailed upon by peeved pop-culture fans of the classic Bill Murray movie. They had read reports about director Paul Feig’s plan to reinvent the franchise from the ground up, as well as his seemingly sparse knowledge of the Ghostbusters universe. Feig had basically transformed a movie about four out of shape, middle-aged men, three of them white and one black to a chick flick with four out of shape, middle-aged women, three of them white and one black. Groundbreaking.

This, coupled with the fact that the promo video was intensely boring, led to it becoming the most-disliked movie trailer in YouTube’s history.

Under normal circumstances, this would not be hugely controversial. Cult franchises like Ghostbusters can be treacherous territory: upset the fans and you may be in for a lifetime of loathing. Just think of what fans did to George Lucas after The Phantom Menace hit theaters.

But these weren’t normal circumstances, and the fan’s reaction to Ghostbusters quickly became a media and political controversy. Partly as a means to market the movie, Feig and the Ghostbusters cast began denouncing its critics as “misogynist” and “right-wing.”

The media, amazingly, swallowed this obvious attempt to delegitimize criticism and ran with it. Not just the film media, you understand, but also the political, mainstream and even alternative media. They had their perfect story: four helpless actresses were being preyed upon by hordes of anonymous men. The frantic pro-Ghostbusters campaign reached peak absurdity when, after disappointing box office returns, politicians from the California Legislative Women’s Caucus gathered at a private screening to watch the movie. After the viewing, their leading members gave what felt to me like a series of pre-arranged statements to journalists, each one of them celebrating the movie as a work of high art and a progressive leap forward.

As always, the smell of butt hurt attracts trolls. Breitbart editor Ezra Dulis put it eloquently: “To a Twitter troll, there is no greater rush than a response from an angry celebrity—the knowledge that you, in the middle of Podunkville, USA, have the power to get under the skin of someone rich, famous, and surrounded by ass kissers.”³⁸

So, when Leslie Jones, one of the four leading actresses in this cinematic train-wreck, began angrily responding to her detractors on Twitter, the result was inevitable. She was feeding the trolls, so they swarmed like frogs on grasshoppers.

Media reports say I was the one who led these swarms. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Jones was engaging in running battles with her detractors on Twitter for hours before I got involved, actively trading insults with them and provoking them.

I criticized Jones, tossing a few jabs her way. The reason lefties in the media saw me as ringleader of the trolls is that it’s hard for them to imagine people moving collectively without a leader. It’s their authoritarianism showing: for them, a herd must have a shepherd. The idea of people thinking and acting independently frightens them.

My only crime was daring to criticize a black woman, itself seemingly proof of racism today. I tweeted that Jones was playing the victim,³⁹ that her character in Ghostbusters was an unfunny racial stereotype, and that her tweets were barely literate.⁴⁰ All are true. (Despite calling people “bitches” all evening, she had the audacity to report me for that last one.)

Like Mogwai, there are very specific rules to follow when it comes to feeding trolls, or else you’ll end up with Gremlins. A small minority tweeted revolting things at Jones, such as comparisons between her and Harambe, the recently deceased gorilla. Jones accused me of supporting the racists tweeting her gorilla pictures (wrong), and she retweeted sycophants accusing me of being a “Gay Uncle Tom.” (Later, she would laughably claim the retweets were a result of her “being hacked”). Finally, she blocked me and closed her Twitter account. I sent out a final tweet (“Rejected by yet another black dude!”) and left it at that. Another easy victory over a hypocritical, thin-skinned Hollywood celebrity.

I can’t stand celebrities with thin skin. Getting hate mail is part and parcel of being famous no matter what you look like. Even someone as ridiculously good-looking as me gets hate mail.

The next day, a day that will live in social media infamy, I was scheduled to headline a “Gays for Trump” party at the Republican National Convention. A few minutes before I was to take the stage, I was banned from Twitter forever. I suspect—but can’t prove—that they waited until just before my event deliberately, to cause maximum damage. This is a company whose employees wrote “#SCREWNERO” on a whiteboard in its San Francisco headquarters.⁴¹

They didn’t plan on my preternatural skill for turning every minor setback into a gigantic, glittering triumph.

Like all progressive imbeciles, Twitter HQ was clueless about the Streisand Effect: whenever censorship is attempted, it simply draws more attention to its target. The immediate result of my ban was the greatest barrage of press attention I’d ever received, up until then anyway. I became Patient Zero in Twitter’s crusade against conservatives, particularly the Trump-supporting kind. CNN, CNBC, and ABC all wanted me on to talk about it. Sometimes I wonder if my biggest enemies are in fact my biggest friends, and are all secretly helping me out while pretending to be leftists in public.

I was the number-one trending topic for a full day, with tens of thousands of users tweeting #FreeMilo in solidarity. My fans scrawled the slogan in chalk outside Twitter’s international network of offices. One of my more mischievous fans filmed himself convincing a group of animal rights activists to chant “Free Milo,” after persuading them that I was a captive donkey.

Do I feel bad about being a catalyst for Twitter’s censorship? No more than Jean-Luc Picard should feel bad about being a catalyst for the Borg’s invasion of Federation space.

Despite what you’ll have read in the media, I neither tweeted anything racist or harassing at Leslie Jones, nor in any way did I encourage the few anonymous people who did. Twitter says I led “targeted harassment” against Jones, which seems to mean “being famous and having the wrong opinions.” My supposed harassment was so bad, Jones was “driven off Twitter.” Though it must not have been that bad because she was back after 48 hours.

This is a shocking double standard. We don’t blame Justin Bieber when he tweets or posts on Instagram about Selena Gomez, prompting death and rape threats toward her. We don’t blame Beyoncé for what the Beyhive does to Taylor Swift. They are never held accountable for the actions of their fans by the media. If Bieber or Bey came out as Trump supporters, I guarantee you this would change.

Another thing you won’t read in the press is that Leslie Jones directly incited harassment against her critics, the very rule violation I was falsely accused of when Twitter suspended my account. A user suggested to Jones that some introspection might be in order if she wanted to stop the wave of trolling, to which Jones responded with an unequivocal call to dog-pile: “Bitch I want to tell everyone about you but I’m going to let everybody else do it I’m gonna retweet your hate!! Get her!!”⁴² In another tweet, she also urged her followers to “go after them like they going after me.”⁴³ Twitter did nothing in the face of these flagrant rule-violations; she didn’t even have to delete her tweets to unlock her account, which—as I know well—is the site’s mildest form of punishment for a terms-of-service breach.

I don’t mean to sound whiny about all this, because my Twitter ban made me a lot more famous. It was one of the best things that ever happened to me. It broke my addiction to the constant little dopamine hits I got from all those retweets and likes. I get a lot more actual work done these days.

Plus, being banned was cool, like Madonna and Andrew Dice Clay being banned from MTV in the 1990s. I joined an elite club of dangerous people banned from Twitter, like musical genius Azealia Banks and right-wing investigative journalist Chuck Johnson. (All three of us are Trump supporters; go figure.) As a result of my Twitter ban, I became, for a huge slice of young America, a forbidden, guilty pleasure. So, yes, I don’t mean to whine because I’m not in the least bit sad about it. But it’s important to set the record straight when the lying mainstream media comes for you with its usual arsenal of name-calling, hysteria, selective disclosure and outright mendacity.

TWITTER GOES TO THE SUNKEN PLACE

With me out of the way, the Left proceeded in its crusade to censor Twitter, with a barrage of pressure from their allies in politics and media. A host of feminist windbags, including ghoulish Democratic congresswoman Katherine Clark and hand-wringing British Labour MP Stella Creasy, ginned up a panic about “death threats” and “trolls” who were supposedly striking fear into innocent, powerless women on Twitter. (Coincidentally, these women almost always turned out to be professional feminist activists and left-wing politicians.)

The narrative was repeated ad nauseam across national media in both Britain and America. Slowly, the platform that once proclaimed itself “the free speech wing of the free speech party” began to contort into a feminist-friendly safe space. Making a joke about feminists put you at risk for losing your account. But you could tweet #KillAllWhiteMen, #MasculinitySoFragile, or “I BATHE IN MALE TEARS” without a care in the world.

Countless right-wingers have been kicked off Twitter, sometimes temporarily, sometimes permanently,⁴⁴ including cultural libertarian YouTuber Sargon of Akkad, and the Canadian writer and anti-feminist Janet Bloomfield. They even put a “safety” filter on all outgoing links to the blog of Vox Day, sci-fi’s leading right-wing iconoclast.

Twitter came down hard on the alt-right—after the 2016 election, dozens of the movement’s prominent voices got the boot. At the same time, Jerome Hudson, an African-American writer for Breitbart, was bombarded with racial slurs including “coon” and “Uncle Tom,” instigated by washed-up rapper Talib Kweli, and Twitter took no action.⁴⁵ In the two months following the election, social media analytics discovered more than 12,000 tweets calling for the death of Donald Trump—tweets that remain on the platform.⁴⁶ Yet Twitter continues to profess its political neutrality. In my time as technology editor for Breitbart, I never saw an account suspended for sending death or rape threats to Donald Trump or any other prominent conservative.

Twitter was secretly discriminating against conservative news sources well before the words “fake news” emerged from a progressive news outlet. In February 2016, a source who worked closely with Twitter revealed to Breitbart that the company had been “shadowbanning” inconvenient Twitter users and maintained a “whitelist” of trusted news sources.

“Shadowbanning” is the sneaky practice of removing or minimizing a user’s posts from public view without alerting the user, who often continues posting, believing nothing has changed. Shortly after Trump’s inauguration, Twitter acknowledged they were hiding tweets from search results.⁴⁷ They began marking entire accounts as “sensitive content,” forcing users to “opt-in” to see certain tweets, rather than opting out, to remove unwanted information. Drudge Report, the biggest conservative site on the web, was flagged as “sensitive content” by Twitter.

If Dorsey won’t address his platform’s blatant bias, he might one day have to answer to the courts. On March 4, 2016, I asked President Obama’s Press Secretary, Josh Earnest, about the role Obama might play in reminding social media platforms about the importance of protecting free expression.

Earnest made it clear that even Obama believed that the success of social media platforms is “predicated on the important protection of First Amendment rights to self-expression.” He also recommended that Twitter users who feel aggrieved by the platform’s policies turn to lawsuits as a response. Several such lawsuits are already in the works.

That was President Obama, the most powerful progressive of the last two decades. If Twitter’s censorious direction received stern words from his administration, Dorsey ought to be quivering in his Birkenstocks with Trump in office.

The death of Twitter is inevitable at this point, but Dorsey certainly isn’t doing anything to slow down the process. Censorship creates a chilling effect, frightening other users from speaking their minds. On Twitter, a site designed for rapid-fire streams of consciousness, that means nothing less than the death of the platform.

There’s an impression, put about by the media, abetted by Twitter itself and now, stupidly, accepted by just about everyone, that Twitter’s problems and the reason the company hasn’t been acquired boil down to “abuse” and “harassment.”

Actually, the opposite is true. The history of social networks knows no exception to this simple rule: when you start clamping down on free expression, you die. Twitter is no different. Twitter can’t maintain user growth because it’s boring (all the cool people left, or have been banned) and because the product is terrible. Not because of “trolls.” If trolls were the problem, comment sections, Reddit, 4chan and YouTube would have closed down years ago.

People love getting into spats on the internet. Some people spend their whole lives doing it. The only people who object to ridicule and criticism are touchy, fragile celebrities and journalists with brittle egos who can’t cope with readers pointing out how biased and stupid they are. Twitter’s problem is not that there’s too much edgy speech, it’s that there’s too little. Also, Twitter’s product is so badly engineered, people who don’t want to hear from each other too often do.

I can’t believe I’m the only person who understands this.

The media’s “war on trolls” is just another kind of class warfare: politically correct, university-educated elites don’t like how the working classes speak. They’re horrified by the ribald humor, sharp language and raucous tone of blue-collar interactions. So they brand it all as “abuse” and “harassment” and close their comment sections because they are too delicate to engage with ordinary people.

The edgiest and most interesting people have now either left Twitter or been struck off. The platform is dying, and so is the business behind it.⁴⁸ You know, I sort of feel bad for anyone banned after 2016. They’re so behind the curve.

And as for suspending me because of a spat with Leslie Jones… come off it. I mean, if you’re going to sell out your core values to a celebrity, at least pick someone funny and/or talented, or at least pretty.

GOOGLE

Twitter is the Silicon Valley company where progressive bias is most apparent, but Google is the company where it is most dangerous. If Google decides that it doesn’t want web users to find something, it would be very difficult to stop them—or even to find out they did anything in the first place. That’s probably why, out of all the Silicon Valley companies accused of bias, it was Google’s that Donald Trump addressed directly.

The occasion that led him to address it was the release of an explosive video showing bias in Google’s search results. In the video, tech channel SourceFed demonstrated that searches for Hillary Clinton did not autocomplete to words that were popular searches if they reflected negatively on the Democratic candidate. For example “Hillary Clinton cri” did not autocomplete to the popular search term “Hillary Clinton criminal.” This contrasted with the competing, though far less influential Bing and Yahoo search engines, where all search terms autocompleted correctly.⁴⁹

Google denied altering its search recommendations to favor Clinton, saying it does not autocomplete terms that are “offensive or disparaging when displayed in conjunction with a person’s name.” But a later experiment from prominent psychologist Robert Epstein found it easy to get Google to display negative search terms for Clinton’s primary opponent, Bernie Sanders… and for Donald Trump.

Eric Schmidt, CEO of the company that owns Google, is very much in the mold of Tim Cook, Jack Dorsey, and Mark Zuckerberg. But unlike those three, his involvement in politics suggests a direct link between his work and his support for left-wing politicians. Schmidt founded The Groundwork, a campaign organization with the sole purpose of putting Hillary Clinton in the White House, by putting Silicon Valley’s technological prowess at the campaign’s disposal.

WikiLeaks confirmed Schmidt’s involvement with the Clinton campaign in an email leak, which included a Democratic staffer acknowledging that Schmidt’s group was working “directly and indirectly” with the Clinton team.⁵⁰ A leaked email sent from Schmidt himself suggested the creation of a voter database that regularly aggregates “all that is known” about individual voters.⁵¹ Creating such a database is Orwellian in the extreme and sounds daunting, but Google, with its vast quantities of user data, could pull it off with frightening efficiency.

It’s not just Clinton, either. A report from The Intercept in April 2016 revealed just how close Google’s relationship with the Obama administration was.⁵² The report showed that Google representatives attended meetings at the White House “more than once a week, on average, from the beginning of Obama’s presidency through October 2015.”

The Intercept’s report also showed how Google operated a “revolving door” with the White House, with employees frequently moving between both. They noted 55 instances of employees leaving Google for federal government jobs during the Obama years; 29 of them went to work directly in the White House. Additionally, 127 government employees left their jobs to work at Google.

With such a close relationship, it’s little wonder Eric Schmidt fought so hard to elect Hillary Clinton, the Obama continuity candidate.

One of Robert Epstein’s earlier experiments found that manipulation of search results can convince undecided voters to back a candidate with frightening efficiency.⁵³ In some demographics, Epstein found that the conversion rate was up to 80%.

If conservatives thought mainstream media bias was bad, just wait until they see the effects of search engine bias.

Some might consider conservatives fortunate that tech companies didn’t use all the powers at their disposal to influence the election. Google could, if they wanted to, ban all links to Breitbart, as could Twitter and Facebook. Ultimately, such a bold move would be a bad business decision—in the current climate, conservatives feel just safe enough on social media not to flock to competing platforms. There is growing awareness that the companies that serve as conduits for speech on the web are no longer politically neutral, but not enough to trigger a mass exodus. Yet.

CONSERVATIVES MUST TAKE ON SILICON VALLEY

Given the high-tech forces ranged against him, it’s nothing short of a miracle that Donald Trump won the presidency. In 2020, when social media and search engines are likely to wield even more power, he may not be so lucky. If conservatives want to keep winning, they need to get serious about Silicon Valley, and it needs to happen fast.

Aside from rare exceptions like Peter Thiel, almost everyone in the world of tech absolutely hates conservatives. Jack Dorsey is in bed, cuddling with Black Lives Matter. He has brought censorious feminists into Twitter to advise the company on who it should ban from the platform.

Mark Zuckerberg, meanwhile, is an ardent globalist who believes the United States should “follow Germany’s lead on immigration.”

Eric Schmidt is less vocal, but as we saw above, potentially far more dangerous. He already worked to put Hillary Clinton in the White House. Who knows what he learned from her loss, or what he will do to sabotage Trump over the course of his presidency?

The biggest advantage conservatives have on the web is Drudge Report, an incredibly well trafficked news aggregator run by conservative media pioneer Matt Drudge. The site can instantly make a story go viral, and has been a constant thorn in the side of progressives seeking dominance of the web. But it’s not a social platform. Social media continues to advance, and we cannot allow progressives to monopolize it without a fight.

Social media bias is far more dangerous to conservatives than mainstream media bias. Users believe they’re choosing information sources themselves, and are more trusting as a result. If conservatives—including President Trump—want to avoid disaster, they need to get serious about pressuring Silicon Valley to stay honest. They should raise the specter of antitrust, media regulation, and all the other regulatory demons feared by America’s social media companies, who have many legal and financial reasons for wanting to remain classified by the courts as politically neutral platforms, even though everyone knows they’re not.

Republicans need to get aggressive, they need to constantly scrutinize and investigate social media companies, keeping them under the spotlight at all times. They need to organize around and encourage competitors. It may be difficult for 60-year-old politicians who still need their grandkids to unlock their phones for them, but it’s their own political future at stake. Hire an intern, gramps.

As for ordinary users, we need to fight back against companies that now oversee so much of our day-to-day communications. Learn the data laws of your home country—what information social media companies are allowed to keep on your activities, and what they’re required to hand over if asked. Find other people who have been treated unjustly by social media companies, and form pressure groups. Organize letter-writing campaigns to your congressmen. Tell conservative and libertarian journalists what’s going on. Better yet, start your own business and create a platform that will live up to the original hopes for social media.

Fighting back against politically biased social media companies is the most important battle for conservatives and libertarians in the coming decade. Leftists at a college campus might influence a few hundred other students if they’re lucky. A social media company can influence tens of millions. There is no greater danger to free expression and free speech today than the far-left biases of Silicon Valley. Do not let them get away with it.

In the end, the censors always lose. But only if there are enough brave free speech warriors calling for their heads.