Big tech censorship was a huge problem during the 2020 election, and yet it pales in comparison to what happened after. Facebook reduced the visibility of political content, making it extremely difficult for political articles to expand their reach on the platform. Since Facebook and other social media platforms had become a huge way for the public to discover news, it was a tremendous blow to political content creators.
It wasn't just political content that got suppressed either. The Biden administration collaborated with social media companies to restrict what they claimed was COVID misinformation. Curiously, many of the alleged conspiracy theories they sought to suppress turned out to be true—but that's a topic for another time.
Things haven't gotten any better, save for the fact that Elon Musk acquired Twitter and the practice of banning conservatives and limiting the reach of their content on that platform has (mostly) been put to an end. But, Twitter, now X, isn't the best platform for generating clicks for articles.
As troubling as things have been so far, I fear things are about to get worse. The mainstream media is still desperately trying to suppress information it doesn't like, and is laying the foundation for even more censorship by claiming that anonymous "right-wingers" are spreading false information online.
The reposts and expressions of shock from public figures followed quickly after a user on the social platform X who uses a pseudonym claimed that a government website had revealed “skyrocketing” rates of voters registering without a photo ID in three states this year — two of them crucial to the presidential contest.
“Extremely concerning,” X owner Elon Musk replied twice to the post this past week.
“Are migrants registering to vote using SSN?” Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, an ally of former President Donald Trump, asked on Instagram, using the acronym for Social Security number.
Trump himself posted to his own social platform within hours to ask, “Who are all those voters registering without a Photo ID in Texas, Pennsylvania, and Arizona??? What is going on???”
The article is grossly one-sided as it seeks to present the issue of online misinformation as a "right-wing" phenomenon and downplay very serious concerns like non-citizen voting—amongst other things.
"The meteoric rise of a group of right-wing pseudonymous influencers who act as alternative information sources has been more recent. It’s coincided with a decline in public trust in government and media through the 2020 presidential election and the COVID-19 pandemic," the report claims. "These influencers frequently spread misinformation and otherwise misleading content, often in service of the same recurring narratives such as alleged voter fraud, the 'woke agenda' or Democrats supposedly encouraging a surge of people through illegal immigration to steal elections or replace whites. They often use similar content and reshare each other’s posts."
Of course, the goal is largely the same: to justify the suppression of content that the left-wing gatekeepers don't want the masses to see—all while being lax in their own assessments of what misinformation actually is. "[T]he Associated Press isn't saying that non-citizens aren't being given Social Security numbers," Jazz Shaw at our sister site Hot Air noted. "They aren't saying that those numbers can be and in some cases are being used on voter registration requests. All they're really accusing the 'anonymous right-wing user' of is potentially citing an inaccurate number if some of the SSNs were checked more than once. Oh, the horror. They've really uncovered a simmering vat of right-wing disinformation here, haven't they?"
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