Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute and senior editor-at-large at Breitbart News, said on Friday 2018 was a “watershed year” for revealing technology companies’ use of political censorship towards advancing left-wing politics.
Schweizer highlighted 2018’s leaks from companies such as Google — including Google leadership’s description of the company as “The Good Censor” and coordination with China’s government to develop a search engine — in an interview with Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily.
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Schweizer said, “Breitbart reporters have done amazing work with these leaks that have come out, which really, I think are indisputable; the fact that companies like Google have a political agenda, and I think this is a really important pivot point — what happened this year — because essentially what you had was, in Washington, people on the political left defending Google and basically saying, ‘Oh, they have a right to it. They have a right to their own political point of view, and we have no problem with their political point of view because we happen to share it.’
Schweizer continued, “And then you have a lot of Republicans who essentially said, ‘Oh, no. You guys don’t understand how economics work. Google is most interested in serving its customers and they would never do anything political that would infringe upon their ability to make money.”
Schweizer added, “Well, those are all nice theories, but they’re all wrong and incorrect, because what has been revealed is that yes, Google and Facebook and these companies do want to make money, but deeply embedded in their corporate culture and their corporate structure is this left-wing view, and the left-wing view is essentially one in which they feel they need to have a transformative effect on their customers and on American society. They’ve been quite open about this. Eric Schmidt of Google and others have said that they view part of their purpose as to transform American values in the direction that they want to go.”
Schweizer went on, “This manipulation, this desire to move American society in the direction that they want to go — is effective. … These are very powerful tools for information control and manipulation, and they do it through censorship [and] by guiding people in directions that they want them to go, and their market dominance; Google has 90 percent of search. Their market dominance gives them the ability to do this. I think this year has been a watershed year for high-tech. I think the reality of what we’re facing has been exposed.”
Schweizer predicted political conflict between large technology firms’ lobbying efforts and those concerned about broad internet “censorship” and “manipulation.”
“Now the question comes down in Washington, DC,” stated Schweizer. “You’re going to have to competing forces. You’re going to have people that are very concerned about what Google and Facebook are doing; concerned about the censorship [and] manipulation. You’re going to have them on one side talking to Americna officials. On the other side you’re going to have these tech companies throwing arond huge amounts of cash to say, ‘Just make this problem go away. It’s not a big deal. That’s the state of where we are today.”
Large technology firms’ leadership suffer from “hubris,” assessed Schweizer.
Schweizer remarked, “There is this sense of hubris among the leadership of high-tech where they sort of view themselves almost as like these god-like figures who have these responsibilities — these burdens that they carry, I’ll say that with irony — to somehow organize society in a way that they think it should be organized.”
Schweizer concluded that 2018 saw “a change in the consciousness of a lot of Americans” in terms of “how they view these tech companies.”
In 2018, 79 percent of Alphabet Inc.’s — Google’s parent company — $7.1 million in political contributions went to Democrats, with 16 percent sent to Republicans. It was the eight largest single spender on lobbying in 2018.
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