Award-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald took to Twitter on Monday to slam tech giants for censoring conservative voices on their platforms, and also criticized liberals who have supported their decisions.
"Tech monopolies -- FB, Google, Apple, Amazon -- have more concentrated wealth & power than any in history," Greenwald wrote. Curiously, he did not mention Twitter by name, although he did reference the ACLU's concerns over all five platforms' decisions to censor conservative voices in the wake of the Capitol Hill riot.
Greenwald described three times when tech giants used "brute force" to "manipulate US politics." He pointed to the suppression of the Hunter Biden scandal in October, when Twitter and Facebook both worked to suppress a bombshell report from the New York Post detailing Hunter Biden's business dealings in Ukraine and China and the connections his father, President-elect Joe Biden, had to them. Facebook suppressed the story alleging it to be fake news while Twitter cited their policy against posting hacked material despite the fact that no material was hacked to obtain the information.
Greenwald also pointed to the recent ban of President Donald Trump from Twitter and Facebook, noting in a separate Tweet that even German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who rules over a country with a far less robust tradition of freedom of speech than the United States, has expressed concern over Trump's ban.
"The right to freedom of opinion is of fundamental importance," Merkel spokesman Steffen Seibert told reporters on Monday.
The final example Greenwald used was the collusion by Apple, Google, and Amazon to wipe the pro-free speech social media site Parler from the internet. Apple and Google both removed Parler from their respective application stores within hours of each other, with Amazon banning the site from their web hosting servers shortly afterward. The tech giants alleged that Parler was not doing enough to prevent violent incitement on their platform in the wake of the Capitol Hill riot by pro-Trump extremists.
According to Greenwald, however, Parler was not used to coordinate the storming of the Capitol which left multiple people dead. "The planning was largely done on Facebook. This is all a bulls--t pretext for silencing competitors on ideological grounds," Greenwald alleged, additionally claiming that none of the people arrested at the Capitol since the riot had accounts on the website.
While Greenwald did not provide evidence to support this claim, he wrote in the following tweet that he would be publishing an article on the matter shortly.
"And liberals are overwhelmingly supportive," Greenwald warned.
Greenwald also argued that concern over the growing power of big tech monopolies is not a right-wing view. He further suggested that the most in-depth report on big tech's abuse of monopoly status "was issued 3 months ago by a Democratic House Sub-Committee."
"As they exist today, Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook each possess significant market power over large swaths of our economy. In recent years, each company has expanded and exploited their power of the marketplace in anticompetitive ways," Democratic Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler and antitrust subcommittee Chairman David Cicilline claimed in a joint statement at the time.
"I wonder how many people subserviently cheering Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook and Google billionaires for destroying Parler a) have ever been on Parler, b) know anything about it besides what CNN & NBC censors have shown them, & c) compared the hate speech there to what's on FB & YouTube," Greenwald questioned.
Powered by StructureCMS™ Comments
Join and support independent free thinkers!
We’re independent and can’t be cancelled. The establishment media is increasingly dedicated to divisive cancel culture, corporate wokeism, and political correctness, all while covering up corruption from the corridors of power. The need for fact-based journalism and thoughtful analysis has never been greater. When you support The Post Millennial, you support freedom of the press at a time when it's under direct attack. Join the ranks of independent, free thinkers by supporting us today for as little as $1.
Remind me next month
To find out what personal data we collect and how we use it, please visit our Privacy Policy
Comments