Christie-Lee McNally, executive director of Free Our Internet, warned of large technology companies’ procurement of political influence via lobbying efforts in Washington, DC. She offered her remarks in a Thursday interview with Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily.
Free Our Internet is a non-profit organization describing itself as an opponent of the “tech-left” and its political censorship of “conservative speech online.”
McNally said:
They control over 90 percent of the internet, so they don’t need to capitulate to us, they don’t need to capitulate to the Senate [or] the president. They don’t need to capitulate … because they’ve bought them all. The amount they pay in lobbyists — if you look at FEC reports and how much they pay in lobbyists [and in] Washington, DC, they don’t have to worry about legislation.
“Clearly they lied last month when they went up there,” said McNally of Twitter and Facebook executives’ denial of political censorship across their digital platforms during testimony before congressional committees.
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Open Secrets itemized Google’s lobbying spending via the technology company’s FEC filings, with its most recent data coming from 2014.
The top recipient of Google’s lobbying spending in 2014 was the Podesta Group, founded by Clinton loyalist and founder of the Center for American Progress and its subsidiary ThinkProgress.
A January-published TIME report noted Google’s lobbying efforts:
When it comes to corporate lobbying efforts, Google outspent other major technology firms last year by millions of dollars, and took the top spot among companies more broadly.
Google (now part of parent company Alphabet) spent over $18 million lobbying politicians in 2017, according to federal disclosure records. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, this is the first time a technology company has spent the most on lobbying costs in at least two decades. Google did not return TIME’s request for comment about its lobbying activities.
McNally praised Breitbart News coverage of threats to free speech and expression posed by the growing power of technology companies under left-wing management. She highlighted Breitbart News’s recent publication of a leaked 84-page document detailing some of Google’s political censorship efforts.
“I want to thank you guys for getting this document and informing people of what we have been screaming for a couple of years, now,” said McNally. “[People have been saying], ‘You guys are crazy. This is not happening.’ We watched the hearings and we talked about back in April and May and we were told, ‘This is just a conspiracy,’ and all of what we have been saying is now in our hands, proof that what we’ve been saying is true.”
McNally described Google’s political censorship as a threat to the First Amendment, “It terrifies me even more … that what we’ve been saying is absolutely happening. The scariest part of the document is [Google declaring it opts for] ‘European tradition’ rather than ‘American tradition.’ That means they want to undermine not only the First Amendment but our Constitution.”
McNally cast Google’s compliance with the Chinese state’s political censorship demands as unscrupulous profiteering.
“It’s all come down to the almighty dollar for [Google], and it’s come down to control,” stated McNally. “When they started out and it was all about American tradition and values.”
Google’s criticisms of America ring hollow as it complies with China’s authoritarian state, assessed McNally.
“I don’t understand how, with the whole China situation … I don’t know how you can be a good censor when it comes to [the] Chinese regime and those types of governments,” remarked McNally. “This is a company whose motto, years ago, was ‘Don’t Be Evil,’ and now they are willing to bend over backwards for a government that does the types of things that they do to their people. They’re willing to censor and basically make a completely alternate internet for that particular government.”
McNally went on:
What’s ironic is how they’ll do that while, at the same time, talk about how awful America is, how awful our president is, how we’re suppressing women [and] minorities. America is the bad actor here, but they’re willing to go into China and set up a completely separate internet to suppress the Chinese people so that they will only see what the Chinese government wants them to see.
A September-published report revealed Google’s development of a search engine for China — named “Dragonfly” — complete with the Chinese state’s censorship demands.
Marlow described the threat to free speech and expression posed by large technology firms as “100 times the threat” posed by left-wing news media outlets such as CNN.
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