Big Tech censorship is driving polarization

I’ve covered free speech backsliding both on college campuses and in broader politics , but perhaps more pernicious than either phenomenon is the coordinated stifling of conservative speech online.

This week, the Associated Press reported on nine exploitable vulnerabilities in electronic voting machines from leading vendor Dominion Voting Systems. One might recall Dominion as the company Donald Trump loyalists claimed influenced the election outcome in 2020. Indeed, MyPillow CEO and staunch Trump ally Mike Lindell was banned from Twitter in January 2021 for expressing as much.

I personally do not concur with Lindell’s claims that the election was stolen, and the Associated Press stressed that there was no evidence the vulnerabilities altered election results.

Yet this is just the most recent example of political speech initially being treated as a thoughtcrime, its proponent being banned from the platform he or she supposedly sullied by challenging the orthodoxy, only for legacy media, months later, to acquiesce quietly to the validity or partial validity of less extreme claims being made on the Right.