Editors’ Note: Those libertarian friends we have should be made aware that The Prickly Pear was recently suspended by YouTube and we were put out of commission in our video section for about a week. Our infraction was never specified but related to running an interview of an individual who made remarks questioning election integrity and the outcome of the 2020 election. Discussing election integrity is not permitted by censors on YouTube. To avoid being shut down, we can’t run interviews on the subject. That is clearly censorship. Moreover, their software is ubiquitous and the only platform that meshes with dominant software in the industry that allows us to build our magazine on the back end. In short, they have a virtual monopoly position in the industry. Such monopoly power allows Big Tech to effectively censor ideas in the marketplace. Jabber about finding “competition” is made by those ignorant of how dominant these platforms really are. In reality, there is no competition. We have never been great fans of anti-trust laws but conservatives and libertarians need to rethink that position.

Republicans think a “red wave” is inevitable in November. But the Democrats still have one big advantage: the ever-tightening grip of Big Tech censorship, which will be used to prevent undecided voters from encountering even the most mainstream conservative news in the runup to the next election. Republicans will have a strong message — but what if voters are prevented from hearing it?

In the runup to the 2020 U.S. presidential election, Google completely suppressed Breitbart News from its search results. Compared to 2016, Breibart News went into the 2020 election with a 99.7 percent reduction in visibility for its links on Google search. The censorship was so severe, no-name blogs with plagiarized headlines and content would appear in search results before the original Breitbart News articles. On searches for the term “Joe Biden,” Google cut visibility on Breitbart News links to zero.

Then, a few weeks before the election, Big Tech teamed up to suppress one of the biggest stories of the cycle: the Hunter Biden laptop story. A post-election poll found that 17 percent of Biden voters would have reconsidered their decision had they been aware of the laptop story alone, not counting the hundreds of Breitbart News stories voters didn’t have access to due to Google censorship.

Biden’s margin of victory in three swing states was less than a percentage point, making tech censorship a pivotal factor in the outcome. There is no law preventing Silicon Valley from not only repeating this plan in 2022, but scaling it up to a massive level – and that’s exactly what they are doing. The groundwork is already being prepared, in a number of ways:

#1 “Independent” Watchdogs Downgrading Conservative Media — NewsGuard Discredits The Right 

No matter how mainstream you are, you aren’t safe. NewsGuard, the establishment “misinformation” watchdog that received funding from the Pentagon and whose software is being rolled out by millions of schoolteachers across the country, recently downgraded Fox News in its rankings of trustworthy and untrustworthy news sources.

NewsGuard users will now see a red warning label next to Fox News links all around the internet, signaling to users that the source is considered untrustworthy by the organization, which was set up by former establishment media figures Steven Brill and L. Gordon Crovitz in 2018, in the early years of the media-concocted “misinformation” panic.

Fox News and Breitbart News have now both received the negative “red” rating from NewsGuard. This means that, going into the 2022 midterm elections, NewsGuard is warning its users not to read the two leading conservative-leaning sources of online news.

Naturally, the sources that pushed the Russiagate hoax and said the Hunter Biden laptop was “Russian disinfo” — a claim repeated by NewsGuard’s co-founder — receive no such warning label.

#2 Facebook Suppressing The News — If The Wrong Side Is Winning, Call Off The Game 

Silicon Valley has also found a way to censor all conservative media at the same time. For years, the left has been wailing and screaming about the success of conservative media on Facebook. Despite algorithm changes that suppressed traffic to conservative websites — by a whopping 20 percent in the case of Breitbart News — conservative media has continued to crush the competition.

Facebook has an answer: if conservative media is winning the news war on its platform, it will simply suppress all news at the same time. This month, the Wall Street Journal reported that the platform is shifting resources away from its News Tab and news distribution, and towards a “creator economy.” This means that news will be featured less frequently to users, whether they ask for it or not. This is a way of preventing unwanted narratives from reaching the public, at the very moment when news coverage of the failures of Democrat rule in D.C. will be ramping up.

This is a repeat of what Facebook did after the 2016 election when it reduced the visibility of political posts — a change that resulted in engagement on Donald Trump’s page dropping by almost half.

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Continue reading  this article at Breitbart.