On Monday, Twitter owner and CEO Elon Musk endorsed the GOP for the midterm election and urged American netizens to vote Republican.
"Shared power curbs the worst excesses of both parties, therefore I recommend voting for a Republican Congress, given that the Presidency is Democratic," tweeted Musk, advocating a power balancing. He even pinned the tweet to the top of his user profile. Earlier, in May, the billionaire announced his plans to cast his ballot for GOP lawmakers.
The US left-leaning mainstream press immediately accused Musk of being irresponsible, demonstrating political bias and influencing his 100 million-plus followers. Still, there is nothing new under the sun: previously, Silicon Valley giants routinely came under criticism from the GOP for silencing conservative voices, tagging and labeling the Republican president's tweets.
Just three weeks before the 2020 elections, Facebook's* Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter's Jack Dorsey had no scruples about limiting circulation or altogether banning the New York Post's bombshell concerning an infamous laptop of Hunter Biden, the son of then-Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden.
The laptop contained gigabytes of damning information potentially threatening Joe Biden's election prospects. Even though US conservative journalists raised the alarm over alleged national security issues related to Hunter's overseas deals and Joe Biden's potential involvement in them, the story was "buried" by major Big Tech platforms.
"I want to be clear that this story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform," tweeted Facebook policy communications manager Andy Stone at the time.
For its part, Twitter resorted to outright banning of the expose, citing the platform's rules against posting "hacked material."
"In line with our hacked materials policy, as well as our approach to blocking URLs, we are taking action to block any links to or images of the material in question on Twitter," a Twitter spokesperson told the American press.
In March 2021, at a congressional hearing on misinformation and social media then-Twitter CEO Dorsey shrugged the responsibility for banning the exposure pertaining to Hunter Biden's "laptop from hell" and claimed that it was a "total mistake." Still, he fell short of revealing who exactly made the decision to black the laptop story out.
Nonetheless, the American conservatives pointed the finger at Big Tech for abetting Democrats. In November 2021, Miranda Devine, a journalist and author of "Laptop from Hell: Hunter Biden, Big Tech, and the Dirty Secrets the President Tried to Hide" wrote that Facebook and Twitter acted in cahoots with "Democrat-friendly media" to censor a story that could inflict political damage to their "preferred candidate" less than three weeks before the 2020 election.
After the US mainstream press admitted the authenticity of the emails found on Hunter's laptop in March 2022, Rasmussen Reports released a study showing that 66% of likely US voters believed the story about Hunter's "laptop from hell" was important, with 69% of voters saying they have closely followed news reports about Hunter Biden, including 37% who have "very closely" followed news about the president’s son. Among those who have been very closely following news about Hunter, 65% said that Joe Biden would have not won the 2020 election if the media had not censored the "laptop from hell" story.
Another story that popped up soon after the 2020 elections shed further light on American tech giants' covert political action. On February 4, Molly Ball, a Nancy Pelosi biographer, released an opinion piece titled "The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election."
The article described how at least since 2019, "a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, work[ed] together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information" in order to defeat Trump. The "cabal's" work was headed by well-known Democratic strategist Mike Podhorzer and stretched to Congress, Silicon Valley and the nation’s statehouse.
Ball revealed that their operations "touched every aspect of the election," including getting states to change voting systems and laws, securing hundreds of millions in public and private funding, recruiting armies of poll workers, etc. They also "successfully pressured social media companies" to take a harder line against "disinformation" spread by American conservatives.
One of those "business titans" participating in the said cabal was Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who "chipped in" $300 million in the effort through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Zuckerberg, in particular, funded state election administrations, as per Ball.
Ball's piece triggered nothing short of a meltdown among American conservatives, many of whom qualified the article as an admission that the 2020 election was stolen by Democrats and their associates, including Big Tech. Moreover, US lawmakers in red states immediately started pushing changes to election laws to ban business tycoons from funding election authorities.
In addition to that, soon after the 2020 election and subsequent January 6 protests – that saw a crowd of American voters storming the Capitol building to prevent certification of electoral votes over fraud concerns – Silicon Valley giants resorted to a new wave of purges specifically targeting then President Donald Trump, his close allies as well as MAGA movement followers.
To cap it off, the latest expose by The Intercept shed light on how Facebook and some other social media platforms had teamed up with the Biden administration's DHS to suppress speech they considered "dangerous," including "the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, US withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of US support to Ukraine," according to a draft copy of the DHS' Quadrennial Homeland Security Review.
Apparently, Elon Musk's pro-GOP tweet looks like a "balancing" act against a backdrop of Big Tech's years-long bromance with the Democratic Party. Perhaps, it will help create a sort of equilibrium on the US political arena.
*Facebook is banned in Russia over extremism.