Big Tech

The case of Hunter Biden

Featured image The alliance of the Democratic Party with the mainstream media and Big Tech serves to suppress politically inconvenient news and promote fake news such as the Shamala space video. What is Hunter Biden good for? The story of Hunter Biden and his laptop can serve as a useful case study. His story certainly makes for his highest and best use (not that there is a lot of competition in that »

Get curious with the Shamala video

Featured image The White House response to the exposure of the Shamala space video as starring child actors is unintentionally revealing. The White House points out that Shamala was not the casting director: The White House on Tuesday said it did not select the children, reportedly child actors, who appeared in a YouTube video with Vice President Harris. YouTube confirmed that it had selected the children in the video and reached out »

Washington Post attacks Facebook for insufficient censuring of conservatives

Featured image The Washington Post is upset that Facebook isn’t censoring a perfectly legitimate point of view presented by some Republican politicians — that Joe Biden’s immigration policies are contributing to the spread of the coronavirus in the U.S. The Post accuses Facebook of allowing elected Republicans to indulge in “hate speech,” spread “coronavirus misinformation,” and raise funds in the process. The Post asserts that the “central claims” of the ads in »

Google resists left’s attempt to induce censorship. So far.

Featured image Sen. Cory Booker, one of the leading phonies of contemporary politics, is trying to shame Google into submitting to an outside audit of the “racial equity” of its policies and practices. Booker and four other Senate Democrats urge Google to hire an independent auditor to issue “recommendations to make the company and its products safer for Black people.” The notion that Google is unsafe for Black people is ludicrous. The »

The panic pandemic

Featured image More than ten years ago, I think, the editors of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal asked me for a blurb to promote the magazine. I wrote a paragraph expressing my appreciation in the course of which I asked the question, “In the age of the Internet, how is it possible for a quarterly magazine to seem the most timely publication in the country?” (Hamlet: “‘Seems.’ madam? Nay, it is.”) Having »

Shapes of things: Ministry of truth edition

Featured image The sickening Jen Psaki announced yesterday that the Biden administration is advising Facebook on “misinformation” in posts bearing on Covid vaccines. In collaboration with the administration Facebook is expected to follow up in the appropriate fashion. Psaki treats it as another day at the office, but this manifestation of the censorship imperative that Facebook has taken up is of course deeply alarming. Let it be duly noted. There are of »

Sting like a Babylon Bee

Featured image I’m not entirely sure whether satire degenerates in the hands of the left, but one could make the case. From Jonathan Swift to Evelyn Waugh, the greatest satirists writing in English have been conservatives of one stripe or another. As for the degeneration, Philip Roth’s stabs at satire might suffice by themselves to make that side of the case. By the same token, we may wonder if the understanding of »

Diversity, Google style

Featured image Until this week, Google’s worldwide head of “diversity” was one Kamau Bobb. Earlier this week the Washington Free Beacon’s Alana Goodman reported that Bobb had written for public consumption in 2007 that Jews have an “insatiable appetite for war” and an “insensitivity to the suffering [of] others.” Goodman explained: The comments were part of a longer meditation from Kamau Bobb, now head of diversity strategy at Google, that also slammed »

Big Tech as Big Brother

Featured image To follow up on Scott’s post below, let’s remember that Facebook censored all talk about the Wuhan coronavirus originating in a Chinese lab. There was always legitimate reason to believe that the virus might have originated there. But only now that the evidence establishes a strong likelihood of this will Facebook finally permit the matter to be discussed on its platform. It’s sickening that Facebook wouldn’t permit discussion of a »

CRB: From Big Tech to Big Brother

Featured image I have devoted my “Shapes of Things” series to the problem of Big Tech and free speech and have used an avatar of Big Brother to anchor the series (as I do on the home page for this post). Seeking to deepen our view of the problem that the series illustrates, I have chosen to preview Daniel Oliver’s essay “From Big Tech to Big Brother” from the new (Spring) issue »

Big Tech Flunks

Featured image Beginning now, the Media Research Center’s Free Speech America operation (in which my organization is one of more than 50 participants) will evaluate Big Tech platforms, on a quarterly basis, for free speech, bias, user transparency and more. It will come as no surprise that in the first quarter of 2021, Big Tech flunked: By almost any measure, the first three months of 2021 were the worst ever for online »

Shapes of things (30)

Featured image Our friend Roger Kimball wears hats including that of the publisher of Encounter Books. Roger writes us with this public service announcement: Amazon made headlines in February when they got into the censorship business. Without notice or warning, they summarily delisted Ryan Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment, a thoughtful, deeply researched, and humane study that I published at Encounter Books some three years ago. But »

Shapes of things (29)

Featured image Our friend John Eastman is the former law clerk to Clarence Thomas and former Chapman University law professor. John was in the news this past January in connection with election related advice he rendered in the Oval Office to President Trump and Vice President Pence. John recently sat for an interview on issues of election fraud with Spectator Washington editor Amber Athey. The Spectator’s pseudonymous Cockburn now reports that YouTube »

Shapes of things (28)

Featured image In parts 18, 20, and 27 of this series we noted Amazon’s suppression of When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Movement, by Ryan Anderson. Anderson is the president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and the founding editor of Public Discourse, the online journal of the Witherspoon Institute of Princeton, New Jersey. Anderson’s book was published by Encounter Books under the leadership of publisher Roger Kimball. Roger took up »

Judge Silberman’s dissent

Featured image Judge Laurence Silberman has had a distinguished career in the law, culminating in his service on the District of Columbia Court of Appeals since his appointment to the bench by President Reagan in 1985. He took senior status on the court in 2000. Accordingly, he now sits as a senior judge on the court. Last week Judge Silberman partially dissented from the court’s decision in Tah v. Global Witness. In »

Shapes of things (27)

Featured image In earlier installments of this series we noted Amazon’s suppression of When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Movement, by Ryan Anderson. Anderson is the president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and the founding editor of Public Discourse, the online journal of the Witherspoon Institute of Princeton, New Jersey. Anderson’s book was published by Encounter Books under the leadership of publisher Roger Kimball. Roger now takes up the story »

Google under attack for insufficient recruiting at HBCUs

Featured image Google is under fire for the way it recruits engineers from colleges. According to the Washington Post: For years, Google’s recruiting department used a college ranking system to set budgets and priorities for hiring new engineers. Some schools such as Stanford University and MIT were predictably in the “elite” category, while state schools or institutions that churn out thousands of engineering grads annually, such as Georgia Tech, were assigned to »