In her new book, “Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections,” Mollie Hemingway reveals how social-media companies…[went] from free-speech advocates to censors… Here, an exclusive excerpt:

Donald Trump’s 2016 victory was a shock to much of the country, but Silicon Valley took it especially hard. The progressive bastion of San Francisco had turned tech companies from libertarian idealists into liberal crusaders…

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From the beginning, the tech overlords were plotting how to strike back.

In one meeting, Google founder Sergey Brin suggested that “Jigsaw,” a project Google had developed to combat Islamic terror propaganda, could be used to shape the opinions of Trump voters…

Another Google engineer wanted to sabotage Trump’s phone, which ran on Google’s Android operating system, as well as ban the Gmail accounts of senior Trump administration officials…

Soon after the election, BuzzFeed was reporting, “Facebook employees have formed an unofficial task force to question the role their company played in promoting fake news in the lead-up to Donald Trump’s victory…”

The group was operating in open defiance of CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who said the idea that Facebook had unfairly tilted the election in Trump’s favor was “crazy.”

By December 2016, Zuckerberg had caved. Facebook adopted a new policy of trying to combat the alleged “fake news” that troubled Facebook’s left-wing employees. The tech giant would start paying media outlets to “fact-check” news on the site…

Media outlets that were supposed to be objectively covering Facebook were now on Facebook’s payroll, given the power to determine all the news that was fit to print…

For years, the dreamers that built Silicon Valley had prided themselves on the potential of the Internet to become a…libertarian oasis that offered people a way of opting out of the institutions that had historically sought to control what they thought and did….

But …[i]n 2018, a whistleblower at Google leaked a document titled “The Good Censor,” and it summed up Google’s role in mediating America’s discourse this way:

“Free speech has become a social, economic, and political weapon.”

In January 2018, Project Veritas, a journalism outlet that specializes in undercover investigations, released a video of a former “content review agent” at Twitter (CEO Jack Dorsey). The agent admitted that the platform was biased against conservatives, while Twitter employees reviewing questionable content “let a lot of the left-leaning or liberal stuff go through unchecked.”…

And Twitter was hardly an outlier. In December 2018, Google CEO Sundar Pichai testified under oath before Congress that the company doesn’t “manually intervene” in search results.

The next month, a Google employee leaked internal discussions…showing that the company did, in fact, interfere with search results…YouTube, the world’s second most popular search engine after Google itself, had a “blacklist” — Google’s term — related to a number of political topics…

Google also appears to have intentionally reduced the search engine rankings and visibility of conservative media. A September 2020 report in RealClearPolitics by Maxim Lott sifted through the data of the consulting firm Sistrix, which tracks data related to search engine optimization. The data clearly show that, starting in 2017, “conservative news sites…have seen their Google search listings dramatically reduced.”…

The decision to blackball conservative websites was almost certainly intentional. In 2018, The Daily Caller obtained more leaked internal communications showing that Google workers had debated burying conservative news sites…

Starting in 2012, psychologist Robert Epstein, the former editor in chief of Psychology Today, conducted a series of experiments to ascertain the degree to which biased search engine results can shape political opinion….

Epstein, a politically liberal Harvard Ph.D., would later report that during 2016 “all 10 positions on the first page of [Google] search results in both blue states and red states” were biased toward Hillary Clinton…

In 2020, Epstein monitored Google results using over seven hundred volunteers in three swing states and concluded, “Google search results were strongly biased in favor of liberals and Democrats. This was not true on Bing or Yahoo. . . . The bottom line…is that these manipulations…could easily have shifted at least six million votes in just one direction.”

Further, Epstein observed what he claimed was overt manipulation by Google. “We also found what seems to be a smoking gun. That is, we found a period of days when the vote reminder on Google’s homepage was being sent only to liberals — not one of our conservative field agents received a vote reminder during those days,” he said…

…Twitter would regularly block or otherwise censor the president’s tweets. The censorship exposed egregious double standards…

Just over a week before Trump’s censored tweet about looting from the George Floyd riots, Khamenei had tweeted, “The only remedy until the removal of the Zionist regime is firm, armed resistance,” and Twitter did nothing…

The elimination of the Zionist regime does not mean the massacre of the Jewish ppl. The ppl of Palestine should hold a referendum. Any political sys they vote for should govern in all of Palestine. The only remedy until the removal of the Zionist regime is firm, armed resistance.

— Khamenei.ir (@khamenei_ir) May 21, 2020

…When deciding whom to censor, Facebook relied on media “fact-checkers” who consider themselves the opposition party. Biased journalists were given the power to scrub their rivals from the Internet…

“At Facebook, we took our responsibility to protect the integrity of this election very seriously . . . We’ve built sophisticated systems to protect against election interference,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg told ABC News shortly after the election. He highlighted his censorship work, which he described as a fight against “misinformation.”

Does this information surprise you? Share in the comments below, and add a prayer for correction to come to media bias.

(Excerpt from The New York Post. Article by Mollie Hemingway. Photo Credit: White House Flickr).