Social media giants like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter promised a new era of unfettered information, bypassing traditional media gatekeepers in the process.
People could decide for themselves what mattered most, echoing the country’s democratic ideals.
Instead, we’re now seeing tech platforms following legacy media’s lead, sometimes literally, in deciding what information we can and cannot see.
New and old media, once at odds for audience share and cultural relevance, are frequently acting in unison. And it’s happening during a critical election year while a pandemic runs rampant across the globe, the facts of which remain in near constant flux.
Author and Daily Wire podcaster Andrew Klavan savaged Big Tech for deciding what information we can and cannot have at our disposal.
“The difference is not between good and bad information … we need all the information so we can decide,” Klavan said on his April 29 podcast. “YouTube has no business censoring anybody. This distrust of the people, this idea that these experts know what they’re doing and the people are fools, it’s just wrong. We need all the information and we need to hear debate.”
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee cried foul after YouTube yanked a video starring two California doctors questioning the government’s stay-at-home mantra.
"These guys are medical doctors," Huckabee said on Fox News. “They are scientists. For heaven's sake, they didn't say anything that was really disputable. They were giving facts [and] figures. I thought the most salient point they made in the course of the video — which I did see before it got pulled — was that historically when you have a pandemic, you quarantine the sick people — not the healthy people. And that was sort of like, you know, the light bulb went off.”
The “critical questions” posed by the doctors are ones “we should all be asking, including and especially our policy makers,”
More recently, Facebook caught heat for banning posts tied to government lockdown protests. Not to be outdone, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki declared on CNN's "Reliable Sources" that pandemic-related content that would "go against World Health Organization recommendations" would be subjected to removal from the site as "a violation of our policy."
The bigger issue, as Guillette sees it, are platforms acting with an unearned level of authority.
“Social media titans are defining themselves to be the experts on what content we should and shouldn’t be allowed to see ... [while] the so-called experts are regularly contradicting themselves,” he says. “In such a confusing environment it’s outrageous for sites to be censoring information.”
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