Big Tech Backfire: Top Dems Blame Facebook & Google Ban on Political Ads for Lackluster Election
According to RealClearPolitics, Democrats have won 221 seats, a loss of eight, in the House of Representatives and Republicans, 209, a gain of nine. Five races have not been called. Of those, one or two may wind up in the blue column and three to four in the red column. The final balance of power in the House will likely be either 222-213 or 223-212. Although the GOP will fall short of winning back control of the lower chamber, they’ve made tremendous gains.
Democrats had been convinced they would increase their majority. Liberal pollsters beclowned themselves this year with their overly optimistic predictions of a great blue wave that would hand their party total control of Congress. Unfortunately for them, this promised blue wave failed to materialize. And nowhere was that more apparent than in the House.
Faced with their humiliating Election Day rebuke, the blame game has begun.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is the party’s campaign arm. Their mission is to get Democrats elected. On Friday, DCCC Chair and Illinois Rep. Cheri Bustos and her counterpart in the Senate, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chair and Nevada Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto issued a joint statement casting blame for their party’s poor showing on Facebook and Google.
In a Friday news release, Bustos and Cortez Masto wrote, “Facebook and Google have no excuses for continuing their reckless political ad ban policies. Their haphazard policies inhibit campaigns from providing Americans with accurate voter registration and election information. And that gets in the way of communities of color from fully participating in elections.”
This statement is basically nothing more than, “Wait, we didn’t think your rules would apply to us.” This is a thinly veiled call for Facebook and Google to exclusively limit the spread of conservative information, which is an unacceptable call from an elected official. Instead of doubling down on restrictive policies after they backfire, they should be pushing to err on the side of free speech.
The statement continues: “The upcoming runoffs in Georgia expose the harmful effects that these ill-advised policies have on our democratic process as candidates are unable to share critical information about imminent deadlines to register to vote and request an absentee ballot for the January 5th election. Political ad bans are a gift to Mitch McConnell and a Republican Party that have tried to suppress voter turnout, registration and other policies that make it easier for Americans to cast their ballots.”
Democrats cannot complain about voter suppression in a year that offered unprecedented opportunities for voters to cast their ballots. The pandemic was a great gift to Democrats in many ways. It allowed them to enact many of the provisions of H.R. 1, the failed House bill that was intended to “remake the electoral system.” The cornerstone of H.R.1 was to increase the use of mail-in voting.
The 600-page bill sought to change the way America conducted its elections. The Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley Strassel wrote an excellent column on this subject.
[firefly_poll]
Strassel wrote that H.R. 1 “focused on empowering the federal government to dictate how states conduct elections — with new rules designed to water down ballot integrity and to corral huge new tranches of Democratic voters.”
Specifically, “The bill would require states to offer early voting. They also would have to allow Election Day and online voter registration, diluting the accuracy of voting rolls. … The bill would require ‘no fault’ absentee ballots, allowing anyone to vote by mail, for any reason. It envisioned prepaid postage for federal absentee ballots. It would cripple most state voter-ID laws. It left in place the ‘ballot harvesting’ rules that let paid activists canvass neighborhoods to hoover up absentee votes.”
Unfortunately, the onset of the coronavirus allowed many provisions of this failed bill to become reality. This opened the door to election fraud and brought us to where we are today.
Mercifully, Bustos and Cortez Masto concluded: “The reality is political ads are not the problem, organic disinformation is, and right now it is running rampant, unchecked on platforms like Google and Facebook. The political ad ban is not solving that problem and has instead created a different one that these companies have an obligation and responsibility to correct.”
Their statement that organic disinformation is running rampant on Facebook and Google is disingenuous at best. Facebook allows content from all mainstream media outlets. Content from conservative media outlets is either removed or flagged with “warnings” that the material is disputed.
Here is a personal example. Last week, I wrote an article that was published on Bongino.com. It was about the Michigan state legislature’s decision to hold a “rare” joint hearing of the House and Senate oversight committees the Saturday after the election to investigate “possible election irregularities.” (Both chambers of the state’s legislature are Republican.) I included quotes from committee members on both sides of the aisle. It was a straightforward news story as opposed to an Op-Ed.
It was published on Facebook, where it became one of the top ten most widely read articles that day. A reporter from the New York Times, Kevin Roose, flagged my article along with two from Breitbart and one from The Daily Wire, all of which were factual, as fake news. The Western Journal’s Kipp Jones wrote about this utterly ridiculous confluence of events here.
Facebook is absolutely teeming with right-wing misinformation right now. These are all among the 10 most-engaged URLs on the platform over the last 24 hours (per @NewsWhip data) pic.twitter.com/WlTR10fRBE
— Kevin Roose (@kevinroose) November 10, 2020
For these lawmakers to point the finger at Facebook and Google for their party’s dismal performance is sheer madness and hypocrisy. Have they forgotten both of these companies (along with the rest of the legacy media) suppressed the bombshell news that former Vice President Joe Biden was allegedly involved and slated to benefit financially from his son’s potentially lucrative influence-peddling deal with a Chinese company? That was a huge story which, if widely reported, would have damaged Biden’s candidacy. And, if the allegations are true, it would make Biden a national security risk.
The entire Democratic Party tried to hide the deterioration of Biden’s cognitive abilities, which is obvious to all.
Without the support of Big Tech and the media, Biden wouldn’t have had a shot at the presidency.
Bustos, Cortez Masto and the rest of the Democrats may want to consider other reasons for their electoral woes such as the party’s sharp left turn. Perhaps voters aren’t quite so ready to defund the police, grant citizenship to millions of illegal immigrants, stack the Supreme Court, grant statehood to Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico and implement the rest of their radical agenda. And just maybe, American citizens aren’t quite as willing to hand over their freedom to the liberal elites who wish to control every aspect of our lives as Democrats thought.
That would be so nice.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
