It’s Episode 48 of CensorTrack with TR. This week, we talked about the massive effects of Big Tech’s thought-policing.
Since the March 2020 start of the MRC’s CensorTrack database, Free Speech America has identified and documented over 4,000 individual cases of biased censorship. Of these 4,000 cases, 172 happened in the first quarter of 2022. And although 172 censored users is a modest number, the censorship doesn’t stop with them.
When a user is censored, other users who would've looked at or interacted with that user are also affected. This is what we at the MRC call the “secondhand censorship effect.” In a recent study, we found that this phenomenon happened at least 144 million times in the first quarter.
We define secondhand censorship as the number of times that users on social media had information kept from them.
As an example, YouTube censored conservative commentator Dan Bongino twice since Jan. 1. Bongino had 870,000 subscribers the first time he was censored and 894,989 subscribers the second time he was censored. Therefore, in the first quarter alone, the secondhand censorship effect for Bongino was 1,764,989.
Related: Big Tech Censors ‘God Bless America’ Over ‘Racism’ and ‘Phishing’
Similarly, Spotify censored renowned podcaster Joe Rogan. The platform removed approximately 70 episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience. This censorship blocked 11 million people from viewing or listening to Rogan’s content.
The effect of censorship is enormous, but the effect of secondhand censorship is even greater. Big Tech and the left hide information from us by censoring content that we could have and should have been able to see, discuss and share. The censorship is undeniable at this point, and we need to hold Big Tech accountable.
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.@TPUSA scores a big victory, forcing The View to retract statements falsely claiming Turning Point had "invited" and "embraced" neo-Nazis at a recent summit.
— MRCTV (@mrctv) July 27, 2022
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