Big Tech hurts us all when it silences President Biden's primary challenger

It’s time for tech bros to stop meddling in politics.

In 2020, all major social media sites banned reporting about Hunter Biden’s laptop computer and the disturbing information found on it. In 2021, those same platforms banned a sitting president from their feeds.

Today, presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the one being silenced.

On Tuesday, the Democrat announced that YouTube had removed another of his videos, this one an interview with a political reporter.

“When industry and government are so closely linked, there is little difference between ‘private’ and ‘government’ censorship,” Kennedy said. “Suppression of free speech is not suddenly OK when it is contracted out to the private corporations that control the public square.”

Google owns YouTube, making one wonder how they’re manipulating the search algorithm for the long-shot candidate.

This is an affront to free speech

Kennedy is a crank and a longtime progressive with a rich history of election denial and environmental absolutism.

But his recent skepticism about COVID-19 vaccines and pandemic mandates has won him a few admirers, both on the left and the right.

RealClearPolitics gives the 69-year-old upstart 14.4% support in their most recent polling average, trailing President Biden by nearly 50%.

Yet despite Kennedy’s odd positions on certain issues, silencing him is not the answer.

It is an affront to our Constitution, the freedom of speech and American democracy itself.

The courts have limited speech here and there, usually for things like false claims in advertising, libel and corporate speech.

Ban TikTok? Where Arizona's members of Congress stand

But political speech has long been considered sacrosanct. The only way a democracy can work is if the citizenry has access to all relevant information.

Suppressing the speech of presidential candidates does violence to our entire system of government.

YouTube, Meta can't just 'do what they want'

Instagram, owned by Facebook/Meta, “permanently removed” Kennedy’s account for sharing “misinformation” about vaccines. Belatedly, they restored it earlier this month after the candidate publicly complained about his banning.

One common defense of the tech bros is that private companies can do what they want on their platforms.

This convenient fiction has been debunked repeatedly, especially since the government often asks those companies to ban certain topics and accounts.

In a transparency report published in 2021, Twitter showed that 199 journalists and news outlets faced 361 demands from governments to remove content in the second half of 2020.

Most of the requests came from India, Turkey, Pakistan and Russia. This is a competition in which the American government should not compete.

Yet the previous year, the U.S. State Department’s Global Engagement Center “demanded” that Twitter suspend nearly 250,000 accounts.

As with Hunter’s laptop, the bureaucrats claimed to be fighting “Russian disinformation.” And, as with Hunter’s laptop, Twitter complied.

Silencing Kennedy only does more damage

For all the worries about conspiracy theories, a big reason they gain popularity is government censorship of dissenting opinions. Citizens wonder, “if they’re hiding this, what else are they hiding?”

Before you know it, a significant segment of the population goes full X-Files.

During the pandemic, even esteemed experts in academia like Harvard’s Martin Kulldorf and Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya were caught in the government’s disinfo dragnet.

The fact that many of their suggestions proved accurate damns the censorship campaign further.

When the tech bros silence President Biden’s primary opponent, the damage increases exponentially.

As one of the largest broadcasting platforms in the world, YouTube is protecting the most powerful man in the world.

This is a major political contribution to Biden and a manipulation of what is supposed to be a free and open political system.

There’s a name for a government whose elites censor its political critics. It isn’t “democracy.”

Jon Gabriel, a Mesa resident, is editor-in-chief of Ricochet.com and a contributor to The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com. On Twitter: @exjon.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. may be a crank, but silencing him isn't OK