Life News
Silicon Valley has enormous power over the flow of information that reaches people around the globe. That’s why it’s vital for Americans to understand how tech giants can manipulate information, either intentionally or unwittingly, to advance a political agenda.
A report by The Daily Caller said that YouTube, which is owned by Google, is using the Southern Poverty Law Center, a left-wing activist nonprofit that bills itself as an objective civil rights organization, to assist in policing content on its video-sharing website.
In 2016, YouTube was accused of censoring PragerU videos, and more recently, Google was lambasted for creating a seemingly partisan “fact-checker” function for its search engine that almost exclusively targeted right-leaning media outlets.
“The left-wing nonprofit [SPLC]—which has more recently come under fire for labeling legitimate conservative organizations as ‘hate groups’—is one of the more than 100 nongovernment organizations … and government agencies in YouTube’s ‘Trusted Flaggers’ program,” according to The Daily Caller.The Daily Signal asked Google if and why it has collaborated with the Southern Poverty Law Center, but it did not respond as of the time of publishing this article. A variety of media sources, including CNN and ABC, cite the Southern Poverty Law Center as an authoritative source on what can be defined as a “hate group.”
But the group has been very loose about how it defines hate, and often recklessly lumps mainstream conservative organizations in with Nazis and other extremist groups. Even Politico has warned that the Southern Poverty Law Center may now be overstepping its bounds by increasingly casting a wider net as its politics drift further to the left.
For instance, the Southern Poverty Law Center recently released a report on “male supremacy,” which it defines as an ideology that “misrepresents all women as genetically inferior, manipulative, and stupid, and reduces them to their reproductive or sexual function.”
The report listed a number of organizations it considers male supremacy “hate groups,” which included American Enterprise Institute scholar Christina Hoff Sommers. Sommers has questioned modern feminist orthodoxy, including the factual basis behind the allegedgender wage gap.
In an interview with The Weekly Standard, Sommers said of her placement on the list:
“I completely reject that. This is a group I used to admire. They once went after Klan members and Nazis and now … [they go after] people like Ben Carson and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. It’s absurd.”
“They’re blacklisting in place of engaging with arguments. They blacklist you, rather than try to refute you,” Sommers said.Life News article continues here
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