Silicon Valley Tightens Its Grip On Free Speech
by Edmund Kozak via Lifezette.com,
ZeroHedge.com
Aug 15, 2017
Alliance between progressives and tech is killing the unfettered exchange of ideas…
Political totalitarianism is coming to America, and it is being ushered in not by government thugs in jackboots but by progressive activists and their allies in Silicon Valley.
In a chilling oped published in The New York Times on July 14, Lisa Feldman Barrett, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University, argued that so-called “hate speech” is the same thing as physical violence because it may possibly cause emotionally fragile individuals stress — and should be made illegal.
Thankfully, the First Amendment prohibits the federal government from following such advice, but online companies are taking it upon themselves to stamp-out so-called “hate speech,” strangling free speech and the free exchange of ideas in the process.
A number of troubling actions by internet companies — Google most prominent among them — are making it increasingly clear that some in Silicon Valley have proclaimed themselves defenders of the progressive, politically correct faith, and that those firms will silence any and all heretics who challenge those beliefs.
“Silicon Valley lives in a politically regressive, exclusive bubble. They are not aware of their own biases in how they talk, have a limited understanding of the philosophy behind free speech, and find it difficult empathizing with other points of view,” said Aaron Ginn, co-founder of the Lincoln Network, a think tank that seeks to promote libertarian ideas in the tech industry.
But Google not only has difficulty empathizing with other points of view — it is also actively trying to suppress them. Google recently made the controversial decision to fire engineer James Damore for authoring an internal memo questioning the company’s ideologically motivated diversity practices and highlighting sound scientific research suggesting that possible biological differences between men and women, not discrimination, could be a factor in the tech field’s high percentage of men.
In the aftermath of Damore’s firing, a number of anonymous current and former Google employees have come forward to reveal the full extent of the company’s efforts to silence right-wing voices. One anonymous employee identified as “Hal” told Breitbart News last week that some employees in Google’s ad sales department are “openly encouraging Adwords customers to pull their ads from Breitbart and Rebel Media.”
Another anonymous employee under the alias “Emmet” confirmed this with Breitbart News, and also revealed the existence of “efforts to demote anything non-PC, anti-Communist, and anti-Islamic terror from search results.”
The Rest…HERE
