Big Tech was part of the Resistance throughout former President Donald Trump's time in office. Top social media companies worked hard to prevent him from being reelected in 2020 through donations, censorship and manipulation.

The Media Research Center found that Facebook and Twitter suppressed and censored at least 260 conservative users for criticizing his opponent: President Joe Biden.

Former Psychology Today editor and psychologist Dr. Robert Epstein called it “election interference.” He told the MRC this kind of censorship “could be considered a valuable, undeclared, in-kind contribution to a political campaign, which is unlawful.”

Just months ahead of the election, Reddit finished its purge of r/The_Donald, Twitter added biased “fact-checks” of Trump’s tweets, and Snapchat said it would no longer promote the president’s content in Discover because it will not “amplify voices who incite racial violence or injustice.” Many tech executives also directly funded or otherwise helped Biden’s campaign.

In March, The Verge noted that Facebook’s fact-checking had become a “political cudgel.” Still, Facebook’s censorship wasn't enough for its very liberal staff, many of whom walked out in protest in June 2020.

One of the most damning revelations of how tech manipulated the election came from Project Veritas. The media outlet captured video of Google’s Responsible Innovation Head Jen Gennai describing how the company worked to retrain its algorithms since Trump's election. She also said breaking up Google would not help “prevent the next Trump situation.”

“We all got screwed over in 2016. The people got screwed over, the news media got screwed over so we’re rapidly been like, what happened there and how do we prevent it from happening again?” Gennai asked.

Speaking of Google, a CBS 60 Minutes investigation found that Google and YouTube removed more than 300 Trump campaign ads in 2019. Most ran for a few days before being removed, but 60 Minutes noted the company’s transparency report provided no explanations of what policies the ads violated.

In addition to all of these methods of potential election interference, tech employees were also involved the old-fashioned way: cold hard cash. Open Secrets data showed election donations from tech employees for the 2020 cycle skewed dramatically to the left at Google, Microsoft, PayPal, Apple, Amazon and Facebook.

• Between April 1, 2020, and Aug. 10, 2020, the MRC collected and verified at least 260 incidents of censorship against conservatives for posting something critical of Biden. These were almost evenly divided between Facebook (129) and Twitter (131).
• “We are not currently promoting the president’s content on Snapchat’s Discover platform,” Snap proclaimed in a public statement. “We will not amplify voices who incite racial violence and injustice by giving them free promotion on Discover. Oddly, Snap’s decision had nothing to do with Trump’s Snapchat content — but rather things he’d said on Twitter.
• Gaming platform Twitch temporarily suspended Trump from the platform after deeming footage of two of his campaign rallies to be hate speech in June 2020.
• The same month, Reddit banned The_Donald subreddit in a crackdown on hate speech. It was the final action against the subreddit, which had been “quarantined” roughly a year earlier.
• Twitter started fact-checking and flagging Trump tweets in May 2020.
• In the 2020 election year, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman was “exploring” ways to boycott Trump in addition to spending up to $100 million to defeat him at the ballot box.
• Trump doesn’t use LinkedIn, but if he did, the platform would be willing to “take action” and “restrict the speech” it considered inciting violence.
• Vox Recode reported that the tech world is “scrambling to patch [Biden’s] digital deficits.” “[B]ehind the scenes, Silicon Valley’s billionaire Democrats are spending tens of millions of dollars on their own sweeping plans to catch up to President Donald Trump’s lead on digital campaigning.”
• After protesters turned to vandalism in D.C., attempting to tear down statues, Trump tweeted that any effort to create an “autonomous” (aka police-free) zone would be “met with serious force.” Twitter flagged the tweet as “abusive behavior.”
• Facebook removed Trump ads about left-wing “mobs” and Antifa in 2019, claiming they were a violation of their “organized hate” policies. The left-wing Anti-Defamation League claimed the ads used a triangular symbol akin to those used by Nazis to classify concentration camp prisoners. Trump campaign staff said the symbol is used by Antifa and that’s why it was in the ads.
• Facebook banned The Epoch Times from advertising after it skirted the site’s political transparency requirements over $2 million worth of pro-Trump ads in 2019.
• Google programmers discussed how to use its search engine to work against Trump’s travel ban. Once reported, the company called it just a “brainstorm” and said none of it was ever implemented.
• A leaked video showed Google executives and staff “deeply offended” by Trump’s election and in mourning over Clinton’s loss. “Let’s face it, most people here are pretty upset and pretty sad,” said co-founder Sergey Brin. “I’ll be mourning all week, I’ll be honest with you.”
• In 2018, a leaked memo from two years earlier indicated Google did all it could with “our features, our partners, and our voices” to increase Latino votes because it (wrongly) expected them to vote for Hillary Clinton. They even called it a “silent donation.”
• At least three separate reports have confirmed Google search was biased in favor of liberal candidates during the 2016 election. Dr. Robert Epstein (a Clinton supporter) found that Google’s search was so biased in favor of Clinton, he estimated it "shifted over time somewhere between 2.6 and 10.4 million votes to Clinton without anyone knowing that this had occurred.”
• Apple’s Tim Cook and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos were two of the 175 tech company leaders who joined an amicus brief to the Supreme Court against Trump’s travel ban. For all their public opposition, SCOTUS allowed a modified version of the ban to stand.
• After Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Agreement, CEOs at Apple, Microsoft, Google and other companies signed a letter proclaiming they were all still in it.

From autofilling search terms to banning political ads, Big Tech companies have the ability to exert tremendous influence on politics. And they have. Big Tech exerted that power frequently ahead of the 2020 election to help then-former Vice President Joe Biden defeat President Donald Trump.

The most obvious example was Facebook and Twitter’s suppression of a New York Post article about Hunter Biden, Joe Biden and Ukrainian businessmen. Twitter used its “hacked materials” policy as an excuse to shut down a story damaging to the Biden campaign. It locked the Post’s account for more than two weeks and suspended Trump campaign officials and others for trying to share the story. 

Facebook manually suppressed the Hunter Biden story, preemptively limiting distribution while waiting for fact-checkers to weigh in. CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Congress, “Based on that risk, and in line with our existing policies and procedures, we made the decision to temporarily limit the content’s distribution while our fact-checkers had a chance to review it. When that didn’t happen, we lifted the demotion.”

It was far from the only example of political interference by Big Tech. The companies altered election-related policies 26 times in 2020. These policy changes included banning political ads, banning ads questioning the election outcome, censoring criticism of mail-in ballots and crackdowns on misinformation. Twitter also censored and otherwise limited Trump and his campaign Twitter account at least 583 times, but not once for Biden or his campaign.

• Twitter censored, suppressed or limited Trump or his campaign’s account 583 times. But it never did any of those things to Biden or his campaign. By labeling many of those Trump tweets “disputed” Twitter also de-amplified them on the platform, preventing many people from seeing them.
• Research psychologist Dr. Robert Epstein told the Media Research Center (MRC) in October 2020, Google is “now focusing most of their vote shifting power on the Senate races, where big-margin outcomes will be hard to contest.” His theory was Google’s control of autocomplete searches could “mobilize the base supporters of Democratic candidates to register to vote and then to vote; they can discourage some Republican voters from registering to vote or voting.” He wrote that the company had “at least 9 million undecided voters they can still play with.”
• Facebook announced multiple policy changes roughly one month before the election. It said, “We also won’t allow ads with content that seeks to delegitimize the outcome of an election.” It also announced a ban on all political and issues-based advertising from the time the polls closed Nov. 3 for an undetermined period of time.
• YouTube changed or adopted 10 election-related policies in 2020 saying, “[W]e’re continuing to raise up authoritative voices and reduce harmful misinformation,” wrote YouTube in a Sept. 24 blog post. The company stated that it would continue to remove misleading information and demonetize content that has “claims that could significantly undermine participation or trust in an electoral or democratic process.”
• Voters who use social media are skeptical of what they read there. An October Rasmussen survey found 79% do not “believe most things” they read on social media. They also found only seven percent of likely voters felt Facebook, Twitter and similar platforms had a “good” impact on politics. Despite the claims of skepticism, Pew Research Center (Pew) found nearly a quarter of users changed their opinions because of something they saw on social media.
• Twitter’s overzealous automated efforts to prevent election misinformation censored accurate and unrelated information too.
• A Pew study released in August found 73 percent of U.S. adults think social media companies censor political views. Broken down by political party, 90 percent of Republicans thought intentional political censorship was “somewhat” or “very” likely, compared to 59 percent of Democrats.
• Twitter Moments coverage was five times more favorable towards the Democratic National Convention than the Republican National Convention.
• “Facebook conducted what they called ‘massive scale contagion experiments. How do we use subliminal cues on the Facebook pages to get more people to vote in the midterm elections? And they discovered that they were able to do it,” Dr. Shoshana Zuboff, Professor Emeritus at Harvard Business School said in Netflix’s “The Social Dilemma.”

Big Tech’s treatment of Joe Biden during the 2020 campaign and after the election couldn’t be any more different from its hostile treatment of former President Donald Trump. 

For starters, employees from the companies donated more than $10 million to the Biden campaign, compared to less than half a million to Trump’s. The social media companies went all in for Biden and worked to prevent Trump’s reelection by suppressing negative information about then-former vice president, while also changing policies to limit content from Trump and his supporters. Among the many ways they tried to suppress Trump support: platforms flagged criticism of mail-in voting, froze or banned political ads and censored hashtags.

Facebook and Twitter both suppressed a bombshell New York Post report indicating that Biden’s son Hunter had introduced him to Ukrainian businessmen while he was vice president. In addition to blocking the story, Twitter locked the Post’s account for more than two weeks. A poll conducted for the Media Research Center indicated if all Biden voters had known about this story, enough would have changed their votes to swing the election to Trump. And it wasn’t even the only negative Biden story Big Tech censored.

• Biden’s transition team had 16 current or former Silicon Valley employees as of Nov. 11, 2020. The list included a former Facebook attorney, Twitter’s former public policy director and people from Amazon, Uber, LinkedIn, AirBnB, DropBox and more.
• When Biden takes over the @POTUS Twitter account, he will be starting from scratch. Twitter decided to change the way it transitions presidential, First Lady, White House and chief of staff accounts to reset them rather than transitioning with all existing followers. The Biden team “pushed back,” but was rebuffed.
• Following the election, The Financial Times reported “Facebook plans charm offensive for Joe Biden” by promoting the COVID-19 vaccine and the Paris Climate Agreement.
• Twitter censored, suppressed or limited Trump or his campaign at least 583 times. But it never did any of those things to Biden or his campaign. By labeling many of those Trump tweets “disputed,” Twitter also de-amplified them on the platform, preventing many people from seeing them.
• Fearing a Biden loss on election night, some Twitter employees had a meltdown.
• An overwhelming majority of donations from Big Tech went to Democrats, including Biden in 2020. Affiliates of Alphabet, Inc., Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and Apple donated $10,243,589 to the Biden campaign during the 2020 presidential race, according to OpenSecrets. Trump received only $427,047 from the aforementioned Big Tech companies.
• The Media Research Center cited eight major ways Big Tech tried to fix the election for Biden. The list included political donations and ad policy changes, as well as, blocking “deceptive” or “manipulated” edits of Biden, but allowing them of Trump. Big Tech also allowed Chinese propaganda to spread and far-left groups to coordinate and mobilize against conservative politicians.
• Once Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) became Biden’s running-mate, Facebook’s mostly left-wing fact-checkers worked overtime to defend her 60 times in 10 days, compared to just three that called her out. Facebook also censored a meme making fun of Harris and referring to an alleged extramarital affair.
• More than 260 conservative Facebook or Twitter users were censored for posts about Biden (in the months leading up to the Democratic National Convention). Posting an innocent meme showing light coming from Biden’s eyes meant an immediate suspension on Twitter for anywhere between 12 hours and two months. Posts that claimed Biden was “creepy,” or sharing actual photos of him with children were also removed.

At best, Silicon Valley liberals don’t understand religion. At worst, they’re openly hostile to it — or at least to religious beliefs which conflict with their liberal values. Whether a lack of understanding or open hostility is at the root of it, tech companies including Apple, Facebook, Google, YouTube, Vimeo, Snopes, MobileCause and Amazon have all censored or punished religious users for their beliefs.

Christians have been hindered by Google, the world’s largest search engine, ever since it banned use of the term “Christian” as a keyword for advertising campaigns. 

Amazon is also a prime example of one of the companies punishing religious groups for their beliefs. It continues allowing Southern Poverty Law Center’s left-wing, anti-Christian zealots to determine which charities are eligible for AmazonSmile. This keeps out Christian ministries and non-profits that affirm traditional Christian ethics regarding sex and marriage. Vimeo has shut down accounts of Christian groups including Pure Passion ministries and the American Family Association (AFA) for very similar reasons. It called the AFA a “terror or hate group” and said Pure Passion’s content “demeaned” homosexuals.

These are just a select few actions tech platforms took against religious groups in recent years. 

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Atheism and agnosticism comprised the beliefs of half of tech workers surveyed by Lincoln Network in 2018 — far higher than the general population. The few people in the tech world who are religious often don’t even feel comfortable telling their colleagues. Conservative Christian and tech entrepreneur Julie Fredrickson told Vox, “People who have actually, very carefully considered belief systems, whether religious or otherwise, don’t always feel safe expressing it.”

Here is further proof of Big Tech’s religious biases:

• An hour before a Family Research Council “Pray Vote Stand” broadcast was scheduled to begin, MobileCause terminated its contract with the FRC. The termination “‘prevented the broadcast from reaching thousands of Christian voters with information about the 2020 election,’ according to FRC.”
• Google’s sister company YouTube demonetized 1,600 of Christian author Dr. Michael Brown’s videos over the issue of homosexuality. The decision was reportedly made by Google Vice President Vishal Sharma. “In short then,” Brown wrote, “biblical content about homosexual practice, spoken accurately and with love, violates Google’s policy.”
• The Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon said, “There is bias baked into the system.” The Bee has been unfairly fact-checked by groups like Snopes. In Dillon’s view, “The [Big Tech] employees are biased, the coding that they’re writing reflects their bias, and a lot of the decisions that they’re making, whether conscious or not, are reflecting that bias.”
• After Vimeo shut down the AFA over its traditional marriage stance, AFA said, “This has been Christian teaching for 2,000 years. Vimeo’s religious bigotry is appalling, and we reject the company’s heavy-handed censorship.”
• Some experts have pointed out the double standard in social media companies’ treatment of Christians versus Muslims: while conservative Christian viewpoints prompt suspensions and bans, hateful Islamist rhetoric and even calls to violence are allowed.
• Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan has spewed hateful and anti-Semitic views online. Facebook chose not to ban him as a “dangerous” person until 2019, when it also banned a bunch of alt-right personalities. Twitter, however, has not removed him.
• Many PragerU videos YouTube has restricted involve Christianity, Judaism or Israel.
• The National Religious Broadcasters created a timeline of censorship of religious content by Big Tech companies with major incidents from 2010-2020.

Big Tech is very supportive of immigration. A sizable portion of the industry’s workforce is made up of immigrants, including Google CEO Sundar Pichai. But Big Tech doesn’t just support increasing visa caps for high-skilled foreign workers. Many in the industry also support DACA, and prominent leaders, including Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, even formed a super PAC to lobby for full amnesty and citizenship for illegal immigrants living in the U.S. 

The tech sector actively supported immigration before former President Donald Trump’s election, so they have also steadfastly opposed his various efforts to restrict immigration. A host of tech companies joined an amicus brief in June 2020, opposing Trump’s temporary freeze on foreign worker visas. 

“These initiatives, including the H-1B, H-2B, and L-1 visa programs, help drive American growth and innovation by attracting the world’s best talent – including engineers, doctors, bankers, biomedical researchers, software developers, and tech executives – at a time when the global contest to attract skilled workers is increasingly competitive,” their brief read. It also argued suspending visas would stifle companies’ ability to attract “the world’s best talent, drive innovation, and further American prosperity.”

Dozens of tech companies also opposed Trump in 2017, when he issued an executive order barring refugees and temporarily halting visitors from several countries. Opponents denounced the anti-terrorism effort as a “Muslim ban.” 

The industry’s pro-immigration efforts predated Trump’s administration. In 2014, former President Barack Obama moved to help millions of illegal immigrants. At the same time, he made some small changes to the immigration process for high-skilled workers and their families but not enough to satisfy the Silicon Valley set.

A number of tech leaders, including Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, founded an immigration super PAC (FWD.us) in 2013 to “help fix our country’s harmful immigration system.” Its homepage describes the beginning of that solution as “creating the ability for the 11 million undocumented immigrants to become citizens.” The group has also lobbied for higher caps on work visas for skilled foreign workers.

• In 2020, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Salesforce and Spotify supported a lawsuit against the Trump administration’s effort to prevent foreign students from residing in the U.S. if their colleges offered only online classes (because of the pandemic).
• Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Netflix and Twitter were among 52 companies that backed a legal challenge opposing Trump’s temporary ban on H-1B and other work visas during COVID-19. Facebook accused the administration of using the pandemic as an excuse and warned: “the move to keep highly skilled talent out of the US will make our country's recovery even more difficult." Tech CEOs Sundar Pichai, Tim Cook and Microsoft President Brad Smith all tweeted criticism of Trump’s immigration freeze.
• Dozens of tech companies signed an amicus brief with other businesses against Trump’s 2017 immigration executive order barring refugees and temporarily halting U.S. visits from citizens of Syria, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and Sudan. Signers included Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, Reddit, Pinterest. Amazon was listed as a witness in the case which was why it didn’t sign.
• Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos sent company employees an email denouncing that same Trump policy. “This executive order is one we do not support. Our public policy team in D.C. has reached out to senior administration officials to make our opposition clear,” he wrote. He went on to say that Amazon was speaking to legislators and had “prepared a declaration of support for the Washington State Attorney General who will be filing suit against the order.”

Big Tech’s immigration lobbying group FWD.us advocates a path to citizenship for all 11 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and LinkedIn Founder (and current Microsoft board member) Reid Hoffman are listed among its founders. The major contributors list included even more tech people, including YouTube co-founder Steve Chen, AirBnB CEO Brian Chesky, Stan Chudnovsky and Chris Cox of Facebook, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, former Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer, Google’s Eric Schmidt, Microsoft’s Brad Smith and Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom.

Firearms and shooting sports enthusiasts and Second Amendment defenders say Big Tech, particularly Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, are becoming more hostile to them and Second Amendment-related speech all the time. 

Advertising or boosting content related to firearms sales has been banned by multiple social media platforms. Branded content with weapons is forbidden by Instagram. YouTube demonetized popular gun blogs and even closed some without notice. In 2018, it removed Karl Kasarda's channel, InRange TV, without warning, forcing him to change platforms.

"It is unclear what the rules are," Kasarda told Fox News. "Specifically, with YouTube, they pretty much enforce whatever they feel based on their bias of the day. Regardless of your personal belief, firearms and their accessories are legal in the United States. So why are we seeing continuing restrictions and challenges towards content about something demonstrably legal yet not against that which is clearly illegal?”

Whitey, a co-owner of Four Guys Guns, told Fox News that having a social media presence had become nearly impossible for gun, gun parts and gun service sellers like them. Whitey’s blog used to get 3 million views a day, but Big Tech changes reduced that to a meager 10,000 per day.

• Twitter has a global prohibition on promotion of all weapons and weapon accessories for all paid advertising, so firearms manufacturers who legally produce and sell guns cannot advertise on Twitter.
• Following the Parkland, Florida, school shooting, Google not only began restricting gun sales, but tried to thwart would-be gun purchasers. Its botched attempt over-censored searches: blocking burgundy the color, trifle (a food), Laguna Beach, Top Gun the movie, the Sex Pistols and Velvet Revolver bands, as well as glue guns, nail guns, Nerf guns and water guns. 
• In 2019, YouTube increased punishments for violating its Community Guidelines and demonetized firearms channels. Some gun and shooting sports enthusiasts fed up with the increasingly “hostile environment” abandoned YouTube, prompting GetZone.com to welcome them to its digital platform. 
• In late 2019, Instagram cracked down prohibiting branded content on weapons including guns, e-cigarettes and vaping.
• YouTube also implemented strict policies against selling firearms or accessories,  instructions on manufacturing guns, ammo or accessories and even linking to sites that sell such products in 2018. Before then, YouTube banned videos explicitly promoting gun sales. It also started taking away ad eligibility from popular firearms channels in 2017.
• Facebook has tightened its gun policies in recent years. It began banning private gun, ammo or parts sales in 2016 on both Facebook and Instagram. But it has allowed firearms retailers to engage in commercial activity.
• Developers told Pocket Gamer Apple started rejecting game apps and updates if they included firearms imagery in 2015. Many had to alter screenshots and game previews to prevent rejection by the App Store.
• Lobbying by anti-gun groups including Michael Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns persuaded Facebook to block minors’ ability to see gun sale posts in 2014. Facebook also said it would remove any sales across state lines or ones that don’t require a background check. It extended the policy to Instagram, requiring a user to view a pop up about the applicable laws before viewing a gun sale-related post.
• Google took its first anti-gun steps in 2012, when it decided to make all shopping results “family safe.” Before that policy change, gun-related products appeared in shopping searches. The new policy blocked adult content including guns, ammo, knives, vehicles, tobacco and other items.

The current fight over tech encryption pits tech companies and civil libertarians against law enforcement, some lawmakers and governments.

The thrust of government arguments against encryption is that law enforcement needs a backdoor to stop terrorists and child predators. Former Attorney General William Barr and Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) were two of the loudest voices demanding encryption backdoors.

Yet, WIRED reported that cryptographers at Johns Hopkins University found “government already have methods and tools that, for better or worse, let them access locked smartphones ...”

“It just really shocked me, because I came into this project thinking that these phones are really protecting user data well,” said Matthew Green, the cryptographer who oversaw the research. “Now I’ve come out of the project thinking almost nothing is protected as much as it could be. So why do we need a backdoor for law enforcement when the protections that these phones actually offer are so bad?”

Tech companies, human rights groups and civil libertarians have pushed back against lawmakers’ demands. They argue intentionally making technology vulnerable puts all consumers at risk of hacking, malfeasance and could even enable authoritarian countries to demand access to private correspondence.

• Seven countries including the U.S. publicly opposed the use of end-to-end encryption, claiming it makes it impossible for companies to spot terrorist propaganda and planning and harder for law enforcement to investigate crimes. ZDNet noted that, “It's worth remembering that many of these tech companies introduced end-to-end encryption precisely because governments were cheerfully snooping on everyone's conversations in the first place.”
• Graham and two GOP cosponsors introduced the Lawful Access to Encrypted Data (LAED) Act in June 2020, to require tech companies to provide the government with access to encrypted data if ordered by a court.
• Tech companies that formed the Reform Government Surveillance Coalition opposed LAED writing, “It would leave all Americans, businesses, and government agencies dangerously exposed to cyber threats from criminals and foreign adversaries, and make us all less safe.” 
• Graham and three cosponsors (Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.)) introduced the EARN IT Act in March 2020. The premise of the bill was to make tech companies earn their Section 230 privileges, but The Verge warned it could result in giving law enforcement the encryption “backdoor” they had been seeking. Several libertarian and civil rights groups spoke out against the bill.
• FBI complaints may have been the reason Apple nixed plans to offer end-to-end encryption for iCloud storage of phone data. Reuters reported in January 2020, “When Apple spoke privately to the FBI about its work on phone security the following year, the end-to-end encryption plan had been dropped, according to the six sources. Reuters could not determine why exactly Apple dropped the plan.”
• Legislators demanded an encryption backdoor in 2019. “It ain’t complicated for me. You’re going to find a way to do this or we’re going to do it for you,” committee chairman Graham told representatives from Facebook and Apple. “We’re not going to live in a world where a bunch of child abusers can have a safe haven to practice their craft. Period. End of discussion."
• In late 2019, Apple's manager of user privacy, Erik Neuenschwander, told lawmakers, "At this time, we've been unable to identify any way to create a backdoor that would work only for the good guys ... In fact, our experience is the opposite. When we have weaknesses in our system, they're exploited by nefarious entities as well."

The news media have been working to suppress global climate change — what the left used to call global warming — skepticism for many years, and now some social media and Big Tech companies are doing their part. 

Skeptics say their content was fact-checked and outfitted with warnings to make their content look erroneous or misleading. They also say Google searches for their names bring up negative results and attacks on them more often than positive information, and some have struggled to get ads and promotional content approved on multiple platforms. PragerU said several of its climate and environmental videos were among 50 that YouTube restricted or demonetized.

Despite conservative complaints, liberals want more censorship and suppression of conservative views about science and climate change. Former Democratic presidential candidate and donor Tom Steyer and Clinton insider John Podesta urged the new Facebook Oversight Board to restrict the CO2 Coalition’s efforts on the platform in July 2020. The liberal group, calling itself Climate Power, wrote to Facebook demanding it close a loophole that allowed some climate skepticism to appear as “opinion,” rather than being flagged or blocked.

The CO2 Coalition responded by challenging Climate Power to debate the issue and prove their derogatory use of the label “climate deniers.”

“We ask each of the 15 signatories to Climate Power 2020’s letter to identify a single denial of a scientific or economic fact in our publications or public statements. Surely some of the answers will involve climate models. Even though model projections are more opinion than fact, more mathematical art than physical science, we look forward to such a debate,” the letter said.

• Michael Shellenberger criticized Facebook and demanded an investigation of the actions it took against his article: “On Behalf Of Environmentalists, I Apologize For The Climate Scare.” Because of its fact-checking relationship with Climate Feedback, Facebook published a warning on his article giving off the impression his article was misleading or false. He contended it was Climate Feedback getting the facts wrong and he was telling the truth.
• Facebook fact-check partner Climate Feedback also labeled an opinion piece about failed climate models “False” in 2019. The CO2 Coalition hit back at what it called “partisan censorship” and complained to Facebook about Climate Feedback’s bias and “errors” in its fact-check against the column. 
• The left turned on one of its own after liberal Michael Moore’s 2019 film “Planet of the Humans” exposed shortcomings of renewable energy sources. Another liberal activist filmmaker, Josh Fox, campaigned against it demanding YouTube pull the film down. YouTube complied, citing a copyright issue over four seconds of footage. Eleven days later YouTube allowed it back on the platform.
• David Wojick of CFACT tested Google search functions in 2018, running his name as well as several well known climate realists or skeptics (Roy Spencer, Pat Michaels, Marc Morano and more). He found half or more of the first page of search results were attacks against them. Wojick said these attacks often included links to DeSmogBlog attacks from years earlier.
• Mathematician Leo Goldstein who founded DefyCCC ran a series of experiments in 2018, testing ads about climate realism and criticism of global warming alarmism on multiple tech platforms. He said he struggled to gain approval for promoted posts and advertising on Twitter, Google, LinkedIn and Reddit.
• Twitter suspended Steve Goddard, a prominent global warming skeptic in 2015 for a “violation of Twitter’s rules.” Goddard told The Daily Caller he’d broken no rules and Twitter would not tell him why he was suspended. After Twitter users rallied for his reinstatement, the company restored his account.
• Reddit banned so-called “climate deniers” from its science forum in 2013. Alarmist site Grist.org, touted the change, calling their presence a “disservice to science and rational exploration.” Moderators restricted their speech by classifying it as a conspiracy theory and prohibiting conspiracy theories.
• JunkScience asked Google to repudiate viewpoint censorship in 2011 after an anonymous employee told Yale’s Forum on Climate Change the site is always working to improve search results. Yale had complained that not enough Google search results for climate change returned sites with “clear statements in line with the vast majority of peer-reviewed climate science evidence.” In other words, they didn’t all reflect the so-called alarmist consensus.
• YouTube restricted or demonetized at least 50 PragerU educational videos including several related to climate and environmental issues (“Climate Change: What do Scientists Say?,” “Climate Change: What’s so Alarming?,” “Fossil Fuels: The Greenest Energy,” “Climate Change” and “Are Electric Cars Really Green?”).