Opinion Policy Analysis by Farah Termos, Staff Writer

December 2nd, 2020

The U.S. Elections; Twitter, Facebook and Google

The U.S. 2020 election sparked major controversy, with opposing candidates President Donald Trump, and former Vice President (and now president elect) Joe Biden, competing in one of the most challenging elections the United States has ever witnessed. Large Tech companies, like Twitter and Facebook, were largely responsible for the marketing of each of the candidates’ campaign, and with that great stride comes immediate backlash over Social Media applications and their role in promoting political agenda’s – and apparently upholding an anti-conservative bias within their platform. 

In late October, days before the election, massive tech companies were accused of blatantly suppressing conservative voices online, censoring what republican senators have termed as “conservative ideals”, and pushing forward the idea that these giant tech firms were promoting an “anti-conservative bias.” Moreover, the accusation was largely made towards Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg, CEO’s of Twitter and Facebook respectively. These sentiments came after both platforms essentially banned a conservative and mostly right-wing opinionated article against Joe Biden, which mentioned supposedly leaked emails sent to and from Biden’s son, Hunter, and President Elect Joe Biden. 

In May, before the much publicized attack against Twitter and Facebook, President Donald Trump took to his biggest platform to date, his official twitter account with more than 80 million followers, to state that social media accounts were effectively silencing republican voices. He stressed on the need to take twitter down (despite the fact that he tweets every day, has his biggest audience there, and also utilizes it to promote white house events). Throughout the following few months, Trump continued to express his dismay over social media, and how it promoted a propaganda of “fake news”, and a complete deviation from the truth, until the ban of the anti-Biden article that occurred in October – where tech CEO’s were called to court by republican senators.

The U.S. Senate

The 3 CEOs: Dorsey, Zuckerberg and Pichai (Twitter, Facebook and Google, respectively) were called to testify before the senate commerce committee on the 28th of October for their roles in the promotion of certain political agendas and biases, and their active censorship of republican voices. What was discussed in the court hearing was the aforementioned, along with a vivid discussion on section 230 of the “Communications Decency Act”, which offered liability protections towards tech giant heads (i.e., the CEO is not liable towards any twitter users’ tweets).  

During the hearing and opening statements of the 3 CEO’s, multiple arguments were placed in favor of a change in section 230 – yet a change that would prove up to date towards serving the interests of everyone (Zuckerberg); along with restraint on changing the law radically (Dorsey), and effectively employing a committee that would work on Section 230 of the CDA (Pichai).

Censorship or Protection of the truth? 

These accusations were made on account of anecdotal evidence. Hence, for conservatives to argue that a private platform (nevertheless, a private firm) is censoring conservative voices is needless to say hypocritical. In fact, over the years, Facebook’s Zuckerberg was accused of censoring and silencing liberal pages (many have accused Facebook in banning BLM protest pages and posts). Thus, as both platforms have effectively banned the promotion of certain harsh political agendas, their main goal remains to promote facts (and factual evidence), remove posts that incite hate and hate crimes, and simultaneously provide a platform for individuals to share their opinions freely (of course with legal protections towards online users being vivid). 

Firms that have used social media platforms freely and daily to express their right-winged opinions heavily for the past 4 years are being accused of promoting anti-conservative agendas. However, seeing these accusations, when you do not have the sheer confidence in your party, proves first hand where the majority of conservatives deep down saw this election heading.