Media Research Center President Brent Bozell will lead dozens of conservative organizations in asking the attorneys general in all 50 states to investigate major technology companies for violations of their states’ consumer protection statutes, Fox News reported.
Leaders of activist groups, think-tanks, publishing companies and more will argue in a joint letter that “conservative speech is under attack.”
“The CEOs of Google, Facebook and Twitter have repeatedly alleged their platforms are neutral forums for political speech and that they support an equal exchange of ideas,” Bozell said. “The actions by these tech companies, however, prove those claims are patently false.
He cited the companies’ coordinated ban on then-President Donald Trump—as well as many of his supporters and an ever-growing list of Americans.
“We cannot allow Facebook, Google and Twitter to continue to deceive the public with lies about the political neutrality of their products,” Bozell said. “We’re urging Americans who believe in preserving free speech to contact their state attorney general and request they investigate these companies for their deceptive trade practices.”
Consumer-protection laws vary by state, but Bozell said the state attorneys general should have no trouble finding evidence that the online publishers were “engaging in deceptive trade practices.”
The deception occurs when these companies “knowingly and intentionally violated their terms of service by publicly claiming their services were neutral platforms when in fact they are not.”
Even as Big Tech companies censor Americans for their political beliefs, they continue to profit from them by selling their private information.
The letter will cite testimony from Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai to show that they likewise have falsely claimed their respective company’s neutrality.
Dorsey, Zuckerberg and Pichai have all said that they removed Trump and other conservatives from their platforms for violating their terms of service or inciting violence.
But—to the extent that these “standards” exist at all—the have not been applied evenly and consistently across the ideological spectrum.
Dorsey and Zuckerberg both were both caught in the lie that their standards do not target conservatives.
“In fact, during a Senate hearing in October 2020, both Twitter and Facebook claimed that they censored liberal accounts as much as conservatives,” the letter said.
“When asked to provide an example of liberal accounts they censor, neither Facebook’s Zuckerberg nor Twitter’s Dorsey could come up with a single example,” it noted.
The three Silicon Valley companies also allow violent threats against Trump to remain on their platforms, while censoring COVID-19 vaccine skepticism or the mere mention of the unconstitutional and fraudulent election.
“Individuals and organizations join and engage with these platforms, providing their personal information and paying for commercial goods and services,” the letter said.
“Individuals and organizations who participate on these platforms do so with the understanding that these platforms are what their CEOs publicly represent them as: unbiased sources of communication,” it added.
The conservative group warned that “millions of Americans” believe they are victims of “deceptive bias.”
The attorneys generals, therefore, “owe it to the citizens of your state to investigate the harmful and fraudulent trade practices of these deceptive platforms.”
