As Congress begins to investigate government interference and Big Tech’s role in suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, MRC Free Speech America’s exclusive CensorTrack.org database hit another milestone — 5,000 documented cases of censorship.
“Elon Musk exposed Twitter's partisan censorship to protect Hunter and the Biden family. Congress needs to dig into what the rest of Big Tech did to deliver the election to Joe Biden,” said MRC President Brent Bozell. “The media and the radical left continue to deny censorship of conservatives. We now have 5,000 documented cases in our exclusive CensorTrack.org database.”
MRC Free Speech America has now reached 5,000 documented cases of censorship in our unique CensorTrack database providing yet more hard evidence to counteract leftists who deny the existence of pervasive Big Tech censorship. The database demonstrates not merely Big Tech’s expansive ability to shut down speech in a heartbeat but also the real harm and havoc that censorship wreaks on American society. PayPal shut down a family-run American flag-carving business. Meanwhile, Google, Twitter and Facebook ran their own election interference operations, with Google having erased Republican campaign websites from search results, and Facebook and Twitter blocking the New York Post Hunter Biden laptop scandal effectively helping to steal away the 2020 election for Joe Biden.
“Lame liberal media activists who masquerade as reporters have falsely asserted for years that Big Tech and legacy media are not biased against conservatives,” said MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider. “We’ve documented 5,000 cases of censorship using our CensorTrack.org database, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Free speech doesn’t exist online. Not for conservatives.”
These cases of censorship have been perpetrated by every major Big Tech platform including Twitter, which covers 56 percent of the database; Meta, Facebook and Instagram, (a combined 28%); Google and Google-owned YouTube (a combined 9%); and communist Chinese government-tied TikTok (3%).
CensorTrack.org has documented Big Tech’s attempt to quash speech that runs counter to a leftist anti-American narrative including criticism of President Joe Biden, questions about COVID-19 and the COVID-19 vaccines as well as attempts to expose critical race theory and transgender grooming in schools.
CensorTrack.org’s 5,000th entry documents Big Tech’s attempt to suppress yet another New York Post piece. New York Post contributor Retired FBI supervisory special agent James A. Gagliano wrote an op-ed in the Post but when he tried to post the piece on LinkedIn, the platform called it spam.
Gagliano wrote about drastically lowered hiring standards at the Memphis Tennessee Police Department and asked whether these changes contributed to the tragic killing of Tyre Nichols. LinkedIn removed Gagliano’s post sharing the piece because it allegedly did not “comply with our Professional Community Policies on spam and scams,” according to screenshots tweeted by Gagliano.
“Unbelievable. I have never posted anything that was flagged EVER,” Gagliano tweeted in response to the censorship. “They’re using ‘spam and scams?’ Makes no sense. This type of censoring always in one direction.”
LinkedIn later restored the post claiming it was a “mistake.” “Initially, your post was removed for going against our policies,” LinkedIn wrote in an email to Gagliano, according to screenshots he tweeted. “As part of our review, we now find that your post doesn't go against our policies and apologize for the mistake.”
Gagliano is not alone, however.
As the database has grown MRC Free Speech America has been able to study some of the most concerning trends in Big Tech Censorship.
Along the road to 5,000 entries, MRC Free Speech America released one of its most cited studies documenting 646 times Big Tech censored criticism of candidate and later president Joe Biden. The research on this topic was found to be so fundamentally important that it was cited in the lawsuit Missouri et al v. Biden et al (pages 71 & 72) and in the amicus brief for Gonzales v. Google (page 32), both of which address Big Tech’s outsized influence and power.
MRC Free Speech America researchers also conducted a study that found 808 examples of Big Tech silencing doctors, media figures and hard-working Americans who dissented from the tightly controlled COVID-19 narrative.
Researchers used the unique database to release two studies that revealed a combined total of 256 examples of times Big Tech shut down speech exposing the left’s exploitative transgender agenda and fascination with indoctrinating children.
In 2022, MRC Free Speech America honed in on the ripple effects of Big Tech’s harmful censorship. Quarterly secondhand censorship reports found that Big Tech withheld content from users at least 275 million times in 2022. The secondhand censorship number documents the loss of social media posts’ respective reach — the real harm that results from Big Tech censorship. For example, Twitter censored a post by comedian Terrence K. Williams that signaled general concerns about election integrity. This act of censorship harmed Twitter users by denying Williams’s 1,400,000 followers access to election-related information.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on so-called hate speech and 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.
