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Big Tech in recent years has consistently discriminated against conservatives and independent thinkers by censoring them online. This has affected everyone from the former president of the United States to everyday men and women.
When Big Tech companies censor someone, they don’t only block that one person. But they also block all of that person’s followers from new ideas and viewpoints.
This phenomenon is best thought of as “secondhand censorship.” Secondhand censorship is defined as the number of times that users on social media had information kept from them.
MRC Free Speech America tracked the effects of secondhand censorship using our one-of-a-kind CensorTrack database. Across seven Big Tech platforms – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn and Spotify – MRC Free Speech America logged a grand total of 144,301,713 times that users on social media had information kept from them in the first quarter of 2022 alone.
MRC calculated the secondhand censorship effect by adding the number of followers each account had at the time of each censorship case recorded during the quarter.
The secondhand censorship effect for the first quarter of 2022 includes only the censorship cases we found or were informed about. Because of this, it represents a mere fraction of the total scale of secondhand censorship taking place.
Big Tech’s lack of transparency means that an incalculable amount of censorship – beyond what is shown in this report – takes place every day.
For this report, MRC worked intensively to derive firm, accurate statistics for the first quarter of 2022. But we did not attempt to quantify the ongoing, current impacts of secondhand censorship spawned by social media companies’ permanent suspensions of certain users initiated in prior quarters. So, the report’s findings do not include people whose accounts were permanently suspended prior to the first quarter.
When Twitter silenced Trump, his more than 90 million followers could no longer see his point of view on current issues on the platform. The most striking, and perhaps boldest, example of social media’s censorship happened in January 2021. Early that month, Facebook and Twitter permanently banned then-President Donald Trump. Trump tweeted an average of 18 times per day during his presidency, according to Trump Twitter Archive. That means secondhand censorship affected users 1,620,000,000 times in a single day stemming from Twitter’s ban of Trump’s account. MRC did not count the secondhand censorship associated with Trump’s continuing bans on Twitter or Facebook through the first quarter of 2022. If we had, though, the number would have been nearly 150 billion.
Big Tech permanently suspended other accounts not included in this report. Former New York Times journalist Alex Berenson (who had about 344,000 Twitter followers before his August 2021 permanent suspension), Free Speech Alliance (FSA) member Project Veritas (which had about 733,000 Twitter followers before its February 2021 permanent suspension) and fellow FSA member and pro-life news outlet LifeSiteNews.com (which had about 200,000 Facebook followers before the platform permanently suspended the publication, according to a group spokesperson) all had their accounts permanently suspended prior to the first quarter. This report does not assess the impacts of secondhand censorship for these three banned groups, nor does it account for the times they could have tweeted, posted or otherwise shared content.
Streaming platform Spotify removed approximately 70 episodes of comedian Joe Rogan’s podcast, but that tells only a portion of the story. In MRC’s count, we tallied only one instance of censorship against Rogan for Spotify’s removal of at least 70 episodes from the platform in February following Rogan’s past uses of the N-word. Rogan had approximately 11 million viewers of his Spotify podcasts, according to Daily Mail, Fox News and New York Post reporting. Had MRC added each of the other 69 removed episodes and multiplied that by the number of viewers Rogan had at the time of each video’s removal, the secondhand censorship effect total would have been 770 million.
Each time Big Tech censors an account or its posts, all of that account’s followers suffer the effects of secondhand censorship.
This is the untold story of censorship – “secondhand censorship.”
National policymakers and the American public must act now to end Big Tech companies’ authoritarian practices against those who confront the status quo.
Big Tech censorship’s added impacts, otherwise known as secondhand censorship, affect social media users around the world. The practice prevents social media users from learning new information and considering viewpoints that run counter to the leftist narrative on current issues.
See this link for a breakdown of our first-quarter secondhand-censorship numbers: Secondhand Censorship Breakdown.pdf.
STUDY: THE SECONDHAND-CENSORSHIP EFFECT
From Facebook and Twitter booting former President Donald Trump to Big Tech’s coordinated suppression of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story, Big Tech has consistently engaged in blatant, forceful efforts to police the thoughts of conservative and free-thinking social media users in recent years.
MRC identified 172 individual cases of direct censorship logged in MRC Free Speech America’s CensorTrack database during the first quarter of 2022. CensorTrack has now logged a total of over 4,000 total cases of Big Tech’s direct censorship.
But when Big Tech companies censor an account or its posts, every one of the censored account’s followers are unable to see the perspectives of the targeted account, or the account’s posts are obscured such that they’re suppressed and more difficult to view. The consequences of this “secondhand censorship” are broad authoritarianism, mass thought-control and a restricted marketplace of ideas.
MRC Free Speech America found at least 144,301,713 times that users on social media had information kept from them in the first quarter of 2022, according to CensorTrack data.
MRC used CensorTrack to tally the number of social media users affected each time Big Tech censored an account or its posts. MRC also tabulated secondhand censorship by platform and by topic.
The biggest purveyors of secondhand censorship in the first quarter of 2022 were Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. During that time, more Facebook users suffered secondhand censorship than on any other platform. Using our CensorTrack database, MRC Free Speech America determined that secondhand censorship affected Facebook users 86,764,526 times, YouTube users 23,543,230 times and Twitter users 17,065,054 times in the first quarter.
MRC also found that secondhand censorship affected Spotify users at least 11,000,000 times, Instagram users 3,828,826 times, TikTok users 2,083,866 times and LinkedIn users 16,211 times during the first quarter of 2022.
Secondhand censorship during the first quarter cascaded across the topics of war and alleged violence, race, transgenderism, COVID-19 and abortion, which are highlighted in MRC’s CensorTrack database.
READERS OF WAR AND ALLEGEDLY VIOLENT CONTENT TARGETED HEAVILY
Secondhand censorship hit allegedly violent and war-related content more than any other topic area during the first three months of 2022. MRC counted 19 total cases of censorship of allegedly violent and war-related content, resulting in users being affected by secondhand censorship 26,366,632 times during the first quarter.
YouTube placed two content filters on a Fox News video of former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) and Fox News host Laura Ingraham about the Ukraine War, as noted in a March 9 CensorTrack entry.
Gabbard said on The Ingraham Angle that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was reportedly open to engaging in negotiations to compromise with Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the war.
YouTube used content filters to chide Fox News subscribers, suggesting that the video “may be inappropriate,” and that the YouTube “community” had identified the video as “inappropriate or offensive.”
Secondhand censorship translated to Fox News’s 9,180,000 YouTube subscribers being prohibited from viewing potentially pivotal news about a possible path toward peace in the Ukraine War. The incident contributed to thwarting a consensus on a viable path out of the war from forming.
More here
http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/free-speech/brian-bradley/2022/07/20/secondhand-censorship-effect-real-impact-big-techs
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