Political observers may remember that when Rep. Marsha Blackburn launched her campaign for Senate in Tennessee last year, Twitter blocked her campaign announcement because the pro-life content in the ad was "an inflammatory statement that is likely to evoke a strong negative reaction." After a public backlash, Twitter eventually backed down.
Silicon Valley liberals, this time at Google, are again censoring an ad from Rep. Blackburn:
Google Ads, an online advertising platform, would not allow the Tennessee Republican’s campaign for Senate promote two campaign videos as search ads because the content doesn’t meet Google’s standards, according to an email sent to the campaign.
“Unfortunately, we won’t be able to show your ads on Google, our search partners, or on Display Network placements until you edit your ads or keywords to make them compliant with our policies,” the email, which was obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation, reads.
The ads, one 30 seconds long and the other 15 seconds, show clips from a campaign event on Sunday of protestors interrupting Blackburn’s moment of silence for the victims of the mass shooting at The Tree Of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.
As Blackburn took the stage to speak to a crowd, she was interrupted multiple times by protesters calling her a “white supremacist.” . . . The handful of protestors didn’t stop when Blackburn began a moment of silence for the 11 individuals who died in the shooting the previous day.
Consider how ironic this is. Liberal protesters interrupted a moment of silence for the victims of the horrific shooting at The Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh last Saturday. There are plenty of opportunities to interrupt during a campaign rally (really, the whole thing), yet the protesters chose that exact moment to start their hateful chant. Yet when a Republican candidate creates an ad showing the extremism and incivility of liberal protesters, their liberal fellow travelers in Silicon Valley deem that ad offensive, because of the very extremism and incivility it is trying to expose.
The big tech companies claim to want to treat all speakers and ideas fairly in enforcing their site policies. But it comes down to implementation. The content managers at the big tech and social media companies are young liberals who were trained in college and by liberal leaders to believe that conservative ideas and principles are inherently evil and hateful. As a result, they have a hard time interpreting a company's policies in a way that is fair to conservative viewpoints.
When censorship against conservative and Republican speakers is reported, there is no action to correct the misapplication of the policy by the content manager until there is a significant public backlash and criticism. So far Google has responded to its removal of Rep. Blackburn's ad by reiterating its policies and its appeal procedure. That is fairly typical: usually conservative and Republican speakers are just out of luck if their ads are censored or their accounts are blocked.
All of this contributes to a disturbing pattern of bias against conservatives and Republicans. While tech company leaders claim to take this problem seriously in their periodic testimony to Congress, the actions of their companies tell a different story.