Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow warned students about the growing power and bias of the Silicon Valley Masters of the Universe during a speech at the Young America’s Foundation’s National Conservative Student Conference.
Alex Marlow, addressing a room of conservative students this week at the Young America’s Foundation (YAF) annual National Conservative Student Conference, spoke about the legacy of Andrew Breitbart, the current state of politics and culture in America, and the looming threat of Silicon Valley tech companies.
Marlow, who has led a push to highlight the immense power and political bias of companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter at Breitbart News, argued that it would be difficult to combat the vast influence of Silicon Valley with free-market startups.
“The one I really want to put on your radar because it is big for you guys is the threat of big tech. We call them at Breitbart, the ‘Masters of the Universe’ because they control so much. Facebook is 2 billion people. Google has a 90 percent market share on search and that’s only part of their business,” Marlow said. “These are monopolies. These are not things that the free market is going to fix on its own. These are the biggest lobbyists in all of Washington. Number one now.”
Marlow touched on the work of Dr. Robert Epstein, who documented search engine trends leading up to the 2016 presidential election. Dr. Epstein’s work, explained Marlow, shows that Google introduces bias in its search suggestions. Epstein demonstrated that when Google suggests positive searches about a candidate, the general public views that candidate more favorably, while the opposite is also true.
Breitbart News reported in 2018 that Facebook had modified its newsfeed algorithm, resulting in a drastic change to the placement of right-wing content on the platform. Left-wing outlets like CNN and NBC saw spikes in their content reach while some right-wing outlets dipped in traffic drastically.
“Facebook can turn up or down a media outlet depending on Mark Zuckerberg twisting a little dial on his own at his desk…Breitbart, according to a Harvard study, was the number one most influential on social media during the 2016 election…just edging out the failing New York Times,” Marlow explained. “The greatest and worst thing happened which is that Harvard University reported that so, which of course, made us all very excited but it apparently made all of the people at Facebook very upset because in January of 2018 Facebook decided they didn’t like that and they turned down traffic mostly of all news but CNN’s traffic went up and Breitbart’s traffic went down. A lot of right-of-center outlets went out of business completely.”
Marlow argued that social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter should be treated as public utilities due to their growing power to control communication.
“I think of these tech giants now, like Twitter, for example, like a utility company. And turning down the reach of Breitbart because we have the wrong politics for the Silicon Valley, leftist, globalists, is akin to AT&T saying that you can’t use the phone as much because of your politics…just hoping and praying that a free market solution is going to pop up to compete with a 2-billion-person strong Facebook is, shall we say, a bit naive,” Marlow finished.