Why Big Tech Censorship’s of the Election Should Worry Christians
By Movieguide® Staff
Though mainstream outlets have declared Democrat Joe Biden the winner of the 2020 election, the results are anything but solidified. However, if you want to share that on social media, you may see a flag or disclaimer that you’re spreading misinformation.
This is just the latest example of big tech’s censorship of free speech.
Last month, Conservative circles were abuzz from the fallout of Twitter and Facebook’s decision to actively censor a major American Newspaper.
On October 14, “America’s oldest newspaper,” the New York Post, published a story about damaging material found on a laptop that reportedly belonged to Hunter Biden, son of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.
The two social media giants both chose to immediately remove any post that shared New York Post articles.
Despite the outright censorship, the story went viral. The article had nearly 5 million views on the NYP’s website as of Wednesday afternoon.
For many Americans, big tech’s blatant censorship was jarring.
However, for those who publish religious angles on mainstream media and pop culture, Facebook and Twitter’s actions come as no surprise.
What should have been a disturbing attack on free speech is not even the latest salvo in big tech’s war against truth.
As workers in the nonprofit sector, we hear horror stories every day of the havoc big tech wreaks on small media companies and ministries.
However, we didn’t experience this firsthand until recently.
In April, during the peak of the stay-at-home orders, we launched a short testimonial from our founder, Dr. Ted Baehr, sharing his testimony and the Gospel on YouTube. We wanted to reach those stuck at home with a message of hope.
Initially, the video reached nearly a half-million people, and thousands of them clicked through to our webpage where they made a decision for Christ and were given a Bible and connected to a local church.
Right as that video began to gather momentum, Google blocked it from receiving more views because it “violated their terms of service.”
After a lengthy battle with Google, we were able to prove that the video did not violate their terms of service.
Of course we knew we were within the parameters of their terms of service, but this is a larger ongoing and increasingly concerning trend.
This last week, we sent out an email to our mailing list telling you about this censorship.
Ironically, it was censored by many of the largest email providers “for content,” resulting in nearly 50,000 of our subscribers being unable to receive the message from us.
Our friends over at the hugely popular Christian satire site, The Babylon Bee, fought with Facebook this week. Facebook stripped the Bee’s ability to make money from their content on Facebook’s platform–all because of a clearly satirical article that referenced a famous MONTY PYTHON scene.
The issue here is not that any of us have actually violated these tech company’s vague community standards … it’s that big tech is reaching, stretching as hard as they can, to treat us as if we have.
Why?
Because they’re actively engaged in suppressing any view that doesn’t fall in lockstep with their own.
Just this week, three top employees at YouTube were caught on video talking about how the largest search provider in the world skews their algorithm, tampers with news search results, and censors political views!
If this doesn’t frighten you, it should.
These companies have incredible power to not only influence culture, but to bend truth. They’ve already begun their attacks on us and many other faith-based companies. Some of us are able to fight back, many are not. That’s why we need our audiences to understand the threat, not only to us as a ministry, but to the future of free access to information, and the future of our country!