ABC hosts and debate moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis asked at least 27 questions of former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris but not a single one touched on freedom of speech or censorship.
Governments across the globe, including Brazil, Canada, the European Union and the United Kingdom have shown their disgust for freedom of speech in recent weeks. Those countries have made concerted efforts to silence their citizens, imprison dissenters and control the flow of information, joining the likes of more well-known censorship regimes in Australia, Venezuela, China and North Korea. In a recent letter, Mark Zuckerberg claimed he regrets following the Biden-Harris administration’s instructions for Meta to censor Americans which just further revealed that the same global censorship is rapidly seeping into American politics. Despite all this, the obviously biased ABC moderators passed over the issue dozens of times.
The absence of questions related to censorship was particularly egregious considering that one candidate has been censored across nearly every platform and the other has helped lead an administration that has actively and repeatedly promoted censorship.
Research conducted by MRC Free Speech America, The Washington Examiner Investigative Reporter Gabe Kaminsky and The Twitter Files paints a damning picture of the Biden-Harris administration’s expansive censorship operations which can be found in at least nine major administrative agencies.
Not to mention, Harris’s disdain for free speech was apparent long before she became vice president.
Harris personally, and repeatedly, called for Trump to be censored in 2019, referring to his constitutionally protected right to free speech as a “privilege.” Harris not only requested, verbally and in writing, that Trump be suspended on Twitter but also suggested that Big Tech companies should be punished for permitting him to speak freely.
“Trump's tweets incite violence, threaten witnesses, and obstruct justice,” Harris wrote in an Oct. 2019 post. “We can't crack down on Facebook but turn a blind eye to Twitter. Big tech companies must be held accountable for how they allow him to abuse their platforms."
After the 2020 election, Harris got her wish. Trump was silenced across nearly every major social media platform including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, Twitch, Shopify and Stripe. When the free speech platform Parler did not follow along with the industry-wide ban, Google and Apple removed it from their app stores, and later, Amazon withdrew its web hosting services that the pro-free speech app Parler used in order to exist online. YouTube even repeatedly removed interviews with Trump in 2021 before he announced his third presidential run.
It doesn’t end there, however. Trump was also censored just hours before Tuesday’s debate when X (formerly Twitter) placed “Adult content” filters over at least two Trump War Room posts. One censored post showed a Trump supporter explaining why he was voting for the former president. Just last week, Amazon’s Alexa would give reasons to vote for Harris but not for Trump, later even going so far as to deny that Trump was shot.
Although Kamala’s account was seriously impacted by censorship once when X prevented users from following her account, this was an anomaly and the platform immediately corrected the issue.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that the State Department be held to account to adhere to the U.S. Constitution and that Big Tech mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on so-called hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
