Federalist Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway torched Big Tech’s election interference campaign while testifying before Congress.
In her opening testimony before the House Administration Committee Wednesday, Hemingway described some of the most palpable threats to American elections, including Big Tech censorship. She particularly called out Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg for his infamous “Zuckerbucks,” or partisan funding of election offices. Just as Media Research Center has previously emphasized, Hemingway stressed that Big Tech censorship has become a menace to our democratic republic, particularly when social media and government collude to suppress speech.
Hemingway explained that instead of an efficient and honest election system, “we now have lengthy election seasons that can last months prior to and even after Election Day.” She listed a lack of a secure chain of ballot custody, a partisan election administration, a biased press, a politicized justice system, and an effort to oust GOP candidate Donald Trump from the ballot and bankrupt him. But leftists also weaponize Big Tech, she emphasized.
“Instead of a vibrant public square where Americans can debate issues and express their strongly held views, we have an elaborate Censorship Industrial Complex, where the government works hand-in-hand with tech oligarchs to suppress and blacklist debate on all the important issues that contribute to election outcomes,” Hemingway summed it up.
In fact, Hemingway herself has experienced this election-interfering censorship. “This is something I know firsthand because our government worked with tech companies to censor me for my election reporting,” she said. Her experience is backed up by data. A Media Research Center poll found in November 2020 that 17 percent of then-presidential candidate Joe Biden’s voters would not have voted for him had they been aware of the president’s scandals that Big Tech and the legacy media censored.
Hemingway added, “Allowing just one of these attacks to infect our electoral system would be a crisis. Allowing all of them at the same time is an existential threat to our system of self-government.”
She then called out one specific Big Tech oligarch, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whose “Zuckerbucks” she covered in her book Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections.
“In the last presidential election, nonprofit groups with very strong ties to the Democrat Party and funded by one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful men, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, took over government election offices, most notably in the Democrat areas of swing states.” Such efforts have increased since, Hemingway stated. Online censorship and “Zuckerbucks” remain a threat to American self-government.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency and an equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us at the Media Research Center contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
