OPINION:
Conservatives are constrained in their attempts to overcome the censorship of social media sites.
Strict devotion to the First Amendment, and opposition to internet regulation prevents them from advocating for government intervention or oversight. Unlike their opponents on the left, they do not believe that any form of speech should be subjected to government control.
The issue is of crucial importance. There is little doubt that the Internet is a decisive force in the 21st century American politics. The Pew Research Center found that 62 percent of American adults get news from social media. An NYU research project reports that search engines systematically exclude certain types of sites while giving greater emphasis on others.
The Internet research organization Can I Rank reports that Google “search results were almost 40 percent more likely to contain pages with a ’Left’ or ’Far Left’ slant.” The study also disclosed that 16 percent of political keywords linked to no conservative-oriented pages at all in first-page results. According to the analysis, Google’s algorithm is inherently oriented to rank left-leaning or centrist viewpoints more prominently than those that are conservative.
The issue began to garner even greater attention when, reports Lifesite, “Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai scolded Twitter for censoring conservative users of its platform ’The company has a viewpoint and uses that viewpoint to discriminate to say the least, the company appears to have a double standard when it comes to suspending or de-verifying conservative users’ accounts as opposed to those of liberal users’”
Some social media sites, in response to charges of political bias, adopted methods that seemed to address the concerns raised, but in fact only added a smokescreen to cover favoritism. Twitter presents a glaring example. In 2016, Robby Soave, in a New York Post editorial, called Twitter’s “Trust and Safety Council” an “Orwellian” coverup, since none of the 40 people that comprise it are particularly concerned about free speech.
Twitter has openly “purged” conservative accounts on occasion. The blatant nature of YouTube’s bias can easily be discerned by the organization’s use of an extreme left-wing group, the Southern Poverty Law Center, to decide what constitutes “offensive” speech.
Conservative commentator Selwyn Duke proposes using antitrust laws, a tempting concept because of the predominant position of media giants such as Google, which accounts for 64 percent of all online inquiries. But that runs into conservative objections as well. It places conservatives in a dilemma, Mr. Duke notes, since they are wary of government regulations. But he argues that if those laws are on the books, then they should be used “where most needed.” Since Google is a “de facto monopoly,” those statutes could be appropriately applied.
There may be another alternative. Conservatives rightly objected to the dangers of government control inherent in classifying Internet providers as “common carriers,” which mandates that all comers are treated equally. A heavily modified version of that concept could be applied. That approach could warrant — without any other government intrusion, regulation, or oversight — that giants such as Twitter and Google treat all users equally.
Alternatively, a truth-in-advertising mandate could be applied, forcing those and similar social media giants to openly declare themselves as partisan players rather than objective sites. That would be particularly helpful in education, since Google is heavily used by students who incorrectly assume that they are getting unbiased research results.
The time for action has become ripe, as a result of the current and prospective investigations by the Federal Trade Commission and the House Judiciary Committee inquiries into Facebook’s mishandling of user data. The prospects for instituting some regulatory oversight of social media giants is almost certain to eventually come about. For conservatives, doing so while the GOP has control over both the White House and Congress would be a prudent move to insure that abuses are addressed without an overlay of more stringent, and unwelcome, government control.
• Frank Vernuccio is editor in chief of the New York Analysis of Policy and Government.
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