CensorTrack.org, which is operated by the Media Research Center, found 169 cases of censorship on major websites such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and search engine giant Google.
MRC defines online censorship as hiding campaign websites from online searches; fact-checking the candidates; removing a candidate’s content; and yanking a candidate’s account altogether.
Among the GOP candidates, Vivek Ramaswamy alarmed YouTube and LinkedIn when he questioned the science behind “climate change,” calling it a “climate religion.” For those comments LinkedIn suspended his account and YouTube told viewers the comments needed more “context.”
“This is election interference in its purest form,” Curtis Houck, an AFN spokesman, tells AFN.
As usual, once its censorship was uncovered, LinkedIn told MRC it had punished Ramaswamy “in error” and corrected its supposed mistakes.
“This wasn’t a technical glitch, it was an intentional act of censorship of my views on Biden, China, and climate change,” Ramaswamy complained in a post on X, formerly Twitter.
Big Tech has also punished Robert Kennedy, Jr., nephew of the famous president who is famously liberal but best known as a vaccine skeptic. The censors at YouTube removed seven videos featuring Kennedy, including interviews he did with Jordan Peterson and with James O’Keefe, the former Project Veritas boss.
MRC also discovered that Bard, which is Google’s AI chatbot, did not list Kennedy when asked to rank all of the 2024 presidential candidates. Before Kennedy declared he was running as an Independent, the chatbot left out Kennedy’s name when asked to list the Democratic presidential candidates.
Among the influential Big Tech giants, Google was the main culprit since it owns YouTube. So its manipulative search engine and outright censorship of videos earned it the top spot.
Among the 2024 candidates, Ramaswamy was censored the most – 18 times – by Google, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Donald Trump was censored nine times but was likely spared more examples because he uses his own site, Truth Social.
According to Houck, the left-wing censors employed by Big Tech are not just harming White House candidates. They are also harming the public, which is being manipulated and deceived online. Houck calls that “secondhand censorship.”
