This article is authored by Mitchell Nemeth
The past few days will go down in history as the time when half the country cheered the use of corporate power to silence the other half of the country.
Today’s society is now largely based on the use of digital technology platforms and the Internet. This past week has seen monopolistic enterprises like Amazon, Alphabet (Google), Apple, Facebook, and Twitter take steps to remove voices from the Right from polite society. CNN’s Oliver Darcy argued that these measures were insufficient. Darcy argued, “it is time TV carriers face questions for lending their platforms to dishonest companies that profit off of disinformation and conspiracy theories.”
To Darcy, it is not enough that the President of the United States has been permanently banned or that prominent right-wing voices have been silenced with the removal of Parler from the application store or that Amazon Web Services cut ties with Parler. CNN and Darcy have for years pretended to be neutral, objective journalists while pushing to silence their competitors. Now CNN senses an opportunity to launch the “kill switch.” Below is a clip from Tucker Carlson’s show that gives more insight.
Darcy remarks that it was Fox, Newsmax, and OAN that are responsible for helping “prime President Trump’s supporters into not believing the truth.” Keep in mind that conservatives never faulted CNN or MSNBC when a Bernie Sanders supporter shot up a GOP baseball practice; the shooter was radicalized after the countless times prominent Democrats claimed their Republican counterparts were going to kill people with healthcare reform.
CNN’s Darcy went so far as to request comment from major providers like AT&T, Verizon, CenturyLink, Comcast, Chart, and Dish. Only CenturyLink felt it necessary to provide a response, saying that they do not “endorse specific media or outlets.” If only Darcy would have stopped with TV carriers.
To finish his Soviet-esque call to silence competitors, Darcy called out “one of the biggest distributors of right-wing talk radio…Premier Networks.” Again, Darcy sought answers from Premier Networks but did not receive a response. With President-elect Biden and many of his close advisors pushing to clamp down on “misinformation,” do not expect to see such efforts disappear. While many conservatives rightfully allege that Big Tech moderates far too much, Democrats with a unified government can now act on their concerns “about tech companies’ lack of moderation and the protections that Section 230 affords them when extremist, violent or otherwise offensive content cause real-world harm.”
