It has become increasingly obvious over the years that the major tech companies that hold a near monopoly over cyberspace also tend to have a decidedly left-wing bias.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson recently addressed this disconcerting reality on his program while discussing the contents of an internal memo he had obtained from Google-owned YouTube.
That April 2017 memo severely undercut the protestations of YouTube against accusations that they have been censoring conservative speech on their purportedly open and unbiased platform.
Instead, it revealed the use of "totally subjective" guidelines for the censoring of videos that appeared to be designed with "maximum political intent."
Carlton pointed to the conservative PragerU series of educational videos as an example of YouTube's censorship and noted how one of their videos challenging the liberal mantra that all police officers are racist was deemed "inflammatory" and demonetized.
Watch here:
That means the publisher could no longer earn revenue through ads and views, regardless of the number of views they received.
As blatant as moves like that are, Carlson noted that YouTube was smart enough to not just scrub their platform of all non-liberal views they don't find agreeable, as that would be far too obvious.
Rather, they tend to quietly place such videos in what is known as a "limited state," a sort of purgatory-type limbo where demonetized videos remain published on the platform but are suppressed and hidden from search results.
That makes them extraordinarily hard for viewers to find, which would be akin to The New York Times being kept off newsstands or the publishers going unpaid for their work.
The memo also revealed that YouTube's criteria for censoring videos was substantially based on vague and undefined terms like "controversial religious or supremacist content," "highly controversial, inflammatory content" or "demeaning language toward protected groups" -- incredibly subjective terms that have different meanings depending upon one's ideological outlook.
[show_poll poll_id=68]
Carlson lamented the fact that the Republican-controlled Congress appeared to be doing nothing about this even as YouTube was "working to undermine sacred American rights."
"They have too much power and are a threat to this country," Carlson warned, and added, "It is time to complain while we still can."