EXCLUSIVE: Free Speech Alliance Warns Big Tech Not to Interfere In 2024 Election

A coalition of conservative groups is warning Big Tech companies to heed the lessons of 2020, and avoid interfering in the upcoming presidential election.

“In the 2020 election, we saw tech platforms bamboozled into performing extreme acts of censorship after a coordinated pressure campaign from government officials,” a coalition of more than 30 groups wrote to America’s 50 largest tech firms on Thursday. The coalition, led by the Media Research Center’s Free Speech Alliance, pointed in particular to tech platforms’ censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story.

“The FBI had known of the laptop’s existence since December 2019 but met with many of your employees prior to the publication of the story to spike it. Unfortunately, several of your companies — in partnership with the Department of Homeland Security-affiliated Election Integrity Project — acquiesced to the FBI’s demands,” the letter reads.

“Twitter (now X) locked the account of the New York Post. Facebook (now Meta) blocked links to the story from being shared. Both firms aggressively suppressed the reporting from their newsfeeds and reduced the visibility of accounts that reposted it,” it continues.

Had Facebook and Twitter not suppressed the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop, it may have hurt President Joe Biden at the polls. The FBI has since said that the laptop is real and that Hunter Biden was taking money from foreigners who sought to influence politicians.

The fiasco led to apologies from Twitter and Facebook. But partisan activists who use claims of “misinformation” as weapons have only doubled down on their efforts.

The letter recalled how Biden’s press secretary recently said videos of the president appearing senile were “cheap fakes” — a line the media took seriously before Biden’s debate performance made clear that the videos were entirely accurate.

There are “disturbing” reasons to believe that tech firms haven’t learned their lesson, the letter says.

Google this month admitted that searches for President Donald Trump weren’t auto-completing in the search bar, and that searches for news about Trump would yield stories about Vice President Kamala Harris. Artificial intelligence models have become increasingly powerful and blatantly ideological, refusing to answer questions that don’t comport with left-wing ideology. Google had to take down the image capabilities of its Gemini AI tool after it erased white people from civilization.

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“Microsoft’s Bing, DuckDuckGo and especially Google Search are all burying the 2024 campaign website of Donald J. Trump while amplifying the website of his opponents. In the Media Research Center’s most recent study, Google was found to have completely hidden Trump’s website from the first fifty search results for the phrase ‘presidential campaign website,'” the letter said.

The free-speech groups also note that “Google interfered in the 2022 midterm elections by censoring Republican Senate candidates’ websites,” and that “Meta and Microsoft’s Xandr have worked with known left-wing censorship organizations like Ad Fontes and NewsGuard to discriminate in ad placement against conservative and right-leaning news organizations.”

“Most major Big Tech companies, including Amazon, Apple, Google and Meta, continue to be members of the trade association NetChoice, which recently asked the Supreme Court to give all tech platforms carte blanche license to discriminate, even on the basis of race,” the letter says.

The groups urged tech CEOs to  resist pressure from the Biden administration and “immediately disclose to the public when a government official asks for or demands the censorship of any American citizen.”

They asked the tech firms to sign a pledge to “never censor a political campaign’s website” and “never employer or otherwise collude with for-profit censorship outfits like Ad Fontes and Newsguard.”

“Our system of government and the ability for citizens to participate in it requires the unfettered, free flow of ideas. Any action you take to limit that speech in advance of the November election is an attack on the very essence of freedom,” the letter added.

On Thursday, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) disbanded, in a sign of growing acknowledgment that it is not possible for small activist groups or AI tools to meaningfully determine the truthfulness of news articles. Emails showed a top GARM member throwing a tantrum that Elon Musk opposed censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story.