Note from senior management: In April of 2018 Breitbart News held a town hall event that shed light on the dangers of Big Tech. As these self-appointed Masters of the Universe continue to show their true agenda, which is to censor conservatives, this video and its content is more relevant than ever.
The key takeaways from the Breitbart News Town Hall, entitled “Masters of the Universe: Big Tech Vs. Free Speech and Privacy,” focus on Google, Facebook, and Twitter meddling in elections, censoring conservatives, and ignoring the privacy and security of their users:
1. The outcome of elections now depends on the tech giants
Dr. Epstein, whose research has focused on the impact of tech bias on voter choices, explained the massive impact that the masters of the universe can have on democratic elections.
“We estimated that if these companies were all working together and supporting the same candidate, and really pulling out all the stops and using all the methods they have to manipulate, they could shift 10 percent of the voting population of America, with no-one knowing that they had done this, and without leaving a paper trail for authorities to track.”
“10 percent could be shifted — that’s a lot of votes, with no-one knowing that they’ve done this.”
Epstein also talked about how the tech giants are already interfering in politics.
“The fact is, we don’t know what rules they’re applying. There’s lots of evidence now that they are systematically suppressing political views that they don’t like. And not just on the right, by the way, but progressives as well – they just go after anyone they want to and there’s nothing we can do about it, there’s no recourse.” Epstein views Facebook as a threat to elections along with Google.
2. Big tech has already meddled in American elections
At the town hall, psychologist Dr. Robert Epstein, an expert on how search engines affect voter decisions, explained his research showing that the Masters of the Universe already had a measurable impact on the 2016 presidential election — in favor of Hillary Clinton.
“There are two main things that we have found,” said Epstein. “We came up with a system, a monitoring system for monitoring search results on Google, Bing and Yahoo for nearly six months before the election in 2016. This story about our findings was broken by the Washington Post in early 2017 and here’s what we found. We found that Google’s search results favored Hillary Clinton in all ten positions of those search results on the first page for almost all of those six months leading up to the election. Now that’s enough to shift two to three million votes, at least, without anyone knowing that they have been manipulated.”
3. We still know very little about who’s responsible for censorship, and how it’s done
Breitbart News senior editor-at-large and president of the Government Accountability Institute Peter Schweizer used the town hall to highlight the lack of transparency on the part of tech giants. Since his comments at the town hall, exclusive stories from Breitbart have shone some sunlight into the inner workings of Silicon Valley censorship — including Google and YouTube’s manual interference in so-called “controversial search queries” including “abortion” and “abortions,” but much about tech censorship remains hidden from view.
“On the one hand, you have situations on YouTube where they shut down a site or say it is inappropriate,” Schweizer said. That could be somebody at a relatively junior level at YouTube who just decides ‘I don’t like what Dennis Prager’s teaching is on Judeo-Christian values or whatever, it’s offensive to me so I’m just going act in my capacity to censor it,’ they do that all the time.”
Schweizer also highlighted radicalism from low-level employees at tech companies. “Part of the problem is that it is not just a leadership issue, it’s not just a problem of corporate policy, it’s a question of Google employees or YouTube employees deciding to take matters into their own hands,” he said.
“There are several proposals, one of the suggestions is that we should take Google’s algorithm make it a public utility, that’s one of the solutions” continued Schweizer. “That is an interesting idea, I do not know if that is the best solution. The other one is to require some truth-in-advertising, or some transparency, so we know what is in the algorithm.”
4. Tech platforms aren’t free — you pay them with your personal data
At the town hall, Breitbart News editor-in-chief Alex Marlow explained how big tech makes money.
“Selling our info is the correct answer and that’s what we’re here to talk about tonight” said Marlow “You guys are not the consumers, you guys are actually the product, you guys are being sold and it’s being done completely clandestinely. Never in the history of the American republic and really the Western world have so few unelected people achieved so much power and so much influence in such a short period of time and they’ve done it almost entirely clandestinely and without free flow of information. They know where you are right now and yet we don’t even know their names.”
Dr. Epstein also highlighted how far Google goes to collect user data — including reading drafts of your emails before they’ve even been sent.
“All gmails, outgoing, the ones you write, and incoming — no matter what email service they’re coming from — they are all recorded, analyzed, every detail is put into your personal profile.”
“Big news companies all use Google to run their email system,” continued Dr. Epstein. “All those emails are running through Google servers. Google has full access — I’m talking about some of the top journalists in the world, who are investigating Google — they’re sharing all of their communications, all of their work products, all of the drafts — they’re sharing it all with Google!”
“I don’t know any major media source, except maybe — believe it or not — Breitbart that doesn’t run [emails through Google servers].”
5. A free and open internet is a major threat to mainstream media
This is why mainstream media gatekeepers like CNN’s Oliver Darcy are the most militant in their efforts to strip social media platforms of their disruptive power. They are the people, after all, who are being disrupted.
At the Breitbart News town hall, Ann Coulter explained how this disruption helped issues suppressed by the mainstream media rise to the fore.
“The Internet is so important for getting news. No one would even know what is going on in South Africa” she continued, referring to the ongoing racial killings of white South African farmers.”
“No one under fifty is getting their news from the mainstream media anymore,” Coulter also added.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. You can follow him on Twitter, Gab.ai and add him on Facebook. Email tips and suggestions to allumbokhari@protonmail.com.
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