It turns out that not just conservatives can expect censorship of their content and advertisements by dominant search and web advertisement service Google, and by the equally powerful video site it owns, YouTube.
It turns out also that if you are a Democrat who fails to fully adhere to the orthodox progressive agenda, then you too will find your Internet voice muted.
Such is the case with Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who also is a 2020 presidential candidate.
The congresswoman from Hawaii, an Iraq War veteran who still serves as a Major in the Army National Guard, has sued Google for $50 million over the suspension of her campaign account during the first presidential debate, while she became a hot topic for Internet searches. That her account went missing is not disputed; however, Google claims it was not due to bias against Gabbard, but instead was caused by its algorithms.
“In this case, our system triggered a suspension and the account was reinstated shortly thereafter,” explained Google spokeswoman Riva Sciuto in July. “We are proud to offer ad products that help campaigns connect directly with voters, and we do so without bias toward any party or political ideology.”
Now, especially after her pending litigation, Gabbard has even more reason to be suspicious of Google.
Earlier this week conservative comedic commentator Steven Crowder reported that he discovered YouTube was suppressing Gabbard’s videos in searches conducted by interested users in the United States. Following last week’s widely reported (fake news) allegation by Hillary Clinton that Gabbard is a “favorite of the Russians” who is being groomed as a third-party candidate to disrupt the 2020 presidential election, Crowder decided to check Gabbard’s online search standing, by experimenting with settings on his virtual private network (VPN).
“We decided to again – while Tulsi Gabbard was in the spotlight – run some comparative searches on YouTube,” Crowder said on Tuesday. “When we set our VPN … to a non-United States country and we searched for Tulsi Gabbard [on Friday], her channel and the videos from her channel all showed up first. Yet, again, when we switched our searches to the United States, however, nothing. Exclusively in the United States, the country in which she is currently running for president, you would receive no results from Tulsi Gabbard’s channel or her videos until scrolling past the first page.”
Gabbard is liberal, but she’s not your standard Democrat in that she argues against “regime change wars” involving the U.S. military, has criticized former President Barack Obama in the past for not using the phrase “radical Islam” to describe jihadist violence, and endorsed Bernie Sanders over Clinton in 2016. She has criticized party colleagues for their support of open borders and third-trimester abortion, and was reluctant in her support of impeachment proceedings against President Trump. Liberal site Salon has described her as an “outlier,” a “weirdo,” and a “left-wing eccentric.” These and other views drew measured praise from some libertarians and conservatives.
Perhaps this earned her the ire of the tech employee masses in Silicon Valley who largely supported Clinton in 2016, that still believe the former Obama Secretary of State should be the rightful occupant of the White House.
A whistleblower who exposed Google’s biased “machine learning” to Project Veritas, former employee Zack Vorhies, said in an interview earlier this month that he believed the search giant was meddling in the 2020 election just like it did in 2016.
“So [people] started searching for Tulsi Gabbard – and Tulsi Gabbard’s ad account, which she uses to capture those people searching for her name and to stay at the top of the Google search results, her ad account went down,” he explained to American Family Radio, as reported by OneNewsNow. “Not only has Google demonstrated election meddling in the past; It’s demonstrating election meddling right now. And it doesn’t matter if you’re Left, it doesn’t matter if you’re Right – Google is going to do it for anyone who challenges the establishment narrative.”
Perhaps Gabbard’s greatest offense against the progressive establishment and its water-carriers in Silicon Valley was her passionate defense of free speech as she explained her lawsuit to supporters, which was captured in a video posted on her YouTube account:
“It’s not just for what [Google] did to my campaign but it’s because of what we’re seeing growing in an alarming trend where these big tech monopolies are directly infringing on our public discourse and, really, in our fair elections,” she said.
“If they can do that to a sitting member of Congress, running for the highest office in the land, they can do that to anyone…or any person who is speaking with a voice that they may disagree with…Can you imagine if Google’s CEO was a conservative Republican who was shutting down Democrat voices that they disagreed with? Can you imagine how up in arms progressives would be if it were their voices being shut down?”