Ronna McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Committee, condemned Big Tech for suppressing conservative voices following reports that Facebook introduced tools that suppressed the traffic of Breitbart News and other conservative publishers by double-digit margins.
“Recent reports shed light on what Republicans have been saying for years – Big Tech companies have been actively suppressing conservative voices,” said McDaniel in a comment to Breitbart News.
“We’ve known for far too long that Big Tech, including Facebook, are extensions of the left’s woke mob and are growing too powerful, and this is just the latest and most blatant example of Big Tech’s clear bias against conservatives. Freedom of speech should not be a partisan issue – because all Americans should be able to make their voices heard.”
McDaniel promised that the Republican party would “continue leading the fight to protect your rights against Silicon Valley elites and the Democrats who enable their attacks on free speech.”
The RNC chairwoman made her comment following the bombshell news that Facebook introduced tools after the 2016 election that slashed traffic to conservative publishers – in Breitbart’s case, by an estimated 20 percent.
Via Breitbart News:
The company introduced two tools after the 2016 election that disproportionately harmed conservative publishers. The Journal highlights internal Facebook research showing that if both tools were removed, it would increase traffic to Breitbart News by 20 percent, the Washington Times by 18 percent, Western Journal by 16 percent, and the Epoch Times by 11 percent. Facebook eventually removed one of the tools while keeping the other — but it is unclear which of them had the most impact on traffic.
According to the Wall Street Journal, one of Facebook’s researchers feared, “We could face significant backlash for having ‘experimented’ with distribution at the expense of conservative publishers.”
The story also revealed that Breitbart News is relegated to a “second tier” of the platform’s News Tab, where it gets less exposure than its corporate establishment competitors. On top of this, Facebook is directly paying Breitbart News’s competitors, establishment media conglomerates including the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times — while offering no such compensation to Breitbart News.
The news emerged in a story from the Wall Street Journal, which shed new light on both Facebook’s censorship of conservatives, and the ceaseless agitation on the part of its left-wing employees for more punishment of Breitbart News and other conservative pages.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.