Topic: Media Research Center
Over the summer, the Media Research Center invented a "secondhand censorship" metric to manufacture absurdly high numbers in advancing its ridiculous, biased narrative that socia media companies trying to enforce their terms of service are guilt of "censorship" against conservatives. Brian Bradley and Gabriela Pariseau ruther that dishonest narrative -- and those ridiculous numbers -- again in an Aug. 16 post:
Big Tech sent a stark message to conservatives during the second quarter of this year that it will continue to fiercely protect President Joe Biden and censor viewpoints that differ from the left’s narrative on major political issues.
Throughout the first two quarters, MRC counted 309 total individual censorship cases that translated to no fewer than 195,251,589 times that Big Tech kept information from social media users through secondhand censorship.
Big Tech companies tirelessly worked to shackle the spread of content across several issue areas; most notably, elections, President Joe Biden and “transgenderism,” from April through June. This discriminatory information control was an attempt to strong-arm Americans to embrace leftist orthodoxy.
[...]
MRC defines secondhand censorship as the number of times that users on social media had information kept from them.
All this definition does is take an example of so-called "censorship" and multply it by the number of followers that account has, generating those ridiculous and meaningless number. And what does the MRC think is disturbing "censortship"? Pointing out that a discredited film has been discredited:
The platform spiked an election-related post by Daily Wire Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro in May, with the help of its fact-checking partner PolitiFact, according to a May 10 CensorTrack entry. The “fact-checker” flagged a Daily Wire article that cited political commentator Dinesh D’Souza ’s documentary “2000 Mules” calling the article “partly false,” as “the same information was checked in another post by independent fact-checkers.” The movie examined voter fraud in the 2020 election by using cell phones’ geolocation data. The secondhand censorship effect of the fact-check meant that Shapiro’s 8.5 million Facebook followers couldn’t see information linking potential voter fraud to the 2020 election.
Of course, "2000 Mules" has been repeatedly discredited, particularly on its claims about geolocation data. The MRC's CensorTrack database essentially acted as a PR agent for D'Souza's film, complaining that "The fact-checker also quoted several experts who said that D'Souza and True the Vote's evidence was incredible because geolocation data can be imprecise. But the fact-checker ignored the particular and targeted parameters for how the data was used in an investigation." CensorTrack didn't explain why readers of Shapiro's post shouldn't know that the film is discredited. One might call that, you know, "cemsorship."
Note that Bradley and Pariseau put "transgenderism" in scare quotes. They continued to do so in complaining that transphobic hate was being called out:
MRC counted 25 individual cases of censorship of content critical of so-called “transgenderism” in the second quarter. Secondhand censorship affected the followers of these accounts 8,111,001 times during the quarter.
Twitter perpetrated the most substantial suppression of so-called “transgender”-related content in the second quarter in June. The platform removed a post by renowned psychologist Jordan Peterson when he used “transgender” actor Elliot Page’s given name, Ellen Page.
Secondhand censorship affected Peterson’s followers 2,800,000 times.
“Remember when pride was a sin? And Ellen Page just had her breasts removed by a criminal physician,” Peterson purportedly tweeted according to screenshots tweeted by his daughter Mikhaila Peterson. Twitter apparently deemed the post to violate its rules against “hateful conduct.”
Peterson is a "renowned psychiatrist"? That's news to us -- we thought he was mostly a guy trying to justify right-wing anti-"woke" rage. Bradley and Pariseau didn't explain why it's OK to maliciously deadname a transgender person or falsely smear the doctor who operated on him as "criminal" -- and they certainly didn't explain their aggressive use of scare quotes.
Bradley and Pariseau concluded by ranting that "MRC continues to call on the American public to push tech companies to end their authoritarian suppression of opposing viewpoints." They didn't explain why hate and lies should be treatd as legitimate "opposing viewpoints" or why exposing them is "censorship."
