NBC Tries to Cancel a Conservative Website

NBC News attempted this week to use the power of Google to cancel our publication, the Federalist. The effort failed, but it should serve as a warning about the unchecked power of big tech companies, particularly when they can be manipulated by partisans, including partisan journalists.

On Monday we received a request for comment through our general media email account from NBC reporter Adele-Momoko Fraser. The message asserted that Google had demonetized our site—preventing us from earning money through Google ads—for violating its rules.

On Tuesday, NBC published an article claiming that Google had made a formal decision to demonetize the Federalist, that we had been formally warned that we were in violation, and that our content—specifically, articles criticizing the Black Lives Matter movement and media coverage of recent riots—was a violation of Google’s rules.

Google subsequently sent a statement to NBC saying all these claims were false. The network updated but hasn’t retracted the story. Ms. Fraser, who works for an NBC division with the Orwellian name “Verification Center,” tweeted her story and expressing thanks for the “hard work and collaboration” of a London-based advocacy group, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which promptly issued a fundraising appeal based on its purported deplatforming of a conservative media organization.