Big Tech has come a long way toward fairness in the last year. Following the mass censorship, dubious fact-checking and blatant bias against conservatives and conservative viewpoints during the past several years, the tide has finally changed. Elon Musk bought Twitter, turned it into X, and restored free speech principles on the platform. Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook have recently followed suit, ending third-party fact checking and shadow-banning. Google and Amazon have also ended many of their woke policies, with Zuckerberg and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos even attending President Trump's inauguration.
But there are still many in Big Tech who want to control and suppress speech, and some old habits die hard. Microsoft is facing criticism for continuing to use NewsGuard in its search coach tool for youngsters in schools. The company had vowed to end its partnership with NewsGuard after Sen. Ted Cruz called it a "biased indoctrination tool." Mike Benz with the Foundation for Freedom Online calls NewsGuard a "for-profit censorship software firm that singlehandedly decimated or bankrupted hundreds of conservative news sites."
Anthony Russo, podcast host and political analyst, tells KTRH this is why conservatives must continue to keep a wary eye on Big Tech firms. "The leadership, including people like Bezos, are starting to lean right...but that doesn't mean that 80-percent of the employees that have been hired over the last several years are going to follow through," he says. "So, no matter how much we want to say it's going in the right direction, we can't fully trust it."
Indeed, many of the employees and shareholders of these Big Tech firms are still as woke as ever. Apple shareholders just voted to keep all of the company's DEI programs in place, even as company leadership wanted to end them.
Russo recommends questioning and verifying any information and content you consume, even if you agree with it. And never rely on outside gatekeepers to decipher it for you. "There's even confusion in what is considered misinformation versus malinformation," he says. "Malinformation means correct, factual based information that could be damaging to society."
"Well who gets to choose that? Who gets to define it? It's not us."
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