RedState’s Seton Motley called out the bias that many conservatives say exists in the tech community, which then negatively affects balance in the media ecosystem. This problem exists both among tech users and employees.

“Facebook’s market cap is a massive $504 billion – but that’s after last week’s one-day drop of $119 billion,” Motley writes. “That massive cash hemorrhage was the result of Facebook’s way-low-addition of new members. Perhaps people aren’t joining Facebook – because they less and less trust Facebook.

“Facebook has time and again proven to be quite reckless with the massive amounts of our data they collect. Also, Facebook portrays itself as an open platform – on which anyone can freely participate.  But they have demonstrated time and again – they are a platform closed to conservatives. And it appears average people – are beginning to not like the inherent unfairness of it all.”

Motley details the history of suppressing conservative viewpoints within the Facebook News Feed algorithm. While tech companies have the right as private firms to create their own company policies, the public, e.g. consumers, has a right to respond and point out bias as well.

Through their most recent crop of Facebook Watch deals, Facebook is financially subsidizing liberal Millennial news outlets like Mic.com (which misses major details about conservative healthcare policy, misreports conservatives’ anti-poverty policies, distorts U.S.racial history and ignores pro-life voices), ATTN (one far from isolated example: ATTN helped readers directly petition their lawmaker to support abortionists at Planned Parenthood), Vox, Mashable and BuzzFeed, while ignoring conservative digital outlets like Independent Journal Review, TheBlaze, The Daily Wire and The Daily Caller. By paying leftist, next-gen brands and ignoring conservative or more moderate digital brands, Facebook perpetuates the leftward tilt of the mainstream media for the next generation.

On another platform, as Jon Levine reports at The Wrap, “Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey came under withering fire Saturday after promoting an article touting the end of bipartisanship and urging one side — Democrats — to thoroughly defeat their opponents as California did in the early 2000s. ‘Great read,’ said Dorsey of the piece in a quote retweet that was swiftly ratio’ed.”

Lincoln Network, the leading right-of-center technology group in Silicon Valley, released the full findings of its pilot survey of nearly 400 tech employees on how they perceive the industry’s openness to different political ideologies. Lincoln also conducted interviews with 23 employees from across the ideological spectrum at Google, Facebook, Apple, Salesforce, Uber, LinkedIn, and smaller start-ups.

The most disturbing discovery was how Google’s response to James Damore’s “Diversity Memo” has already discouraged openness. Last year, Google condemned and fired Damore, a senior software engineer, after the viral public response to his internally-published memo. Damore is now suing Google for bias. When Lincoln asked survey respondents if Google’s response has made them more or less comfortable sharing ideological viewpoints with colleagues, 47 percent replied “less. The impact on different ideological groups was starker: 70 percent of self-identified “very conservative” respondents, 64 percent of “conservatives,” and 66 percent of “libertarians” were “less” comfortable. Even 46 percent of moderates were less comfortable. By contrast, 13 percent of liberals and 26 percent of “very liberal” respondents felt more comfortable sharing their views.

“As with Facebook, Twitter’s institutional bias against conservatives isn’t by accident,” Motley concludes. “It is company policy.  There are profound proactive efforts made – to make conservatives disappear. As with Facebook, Twitter portrays itself as an open platform – on which anyone can freely participate.  But they too have demonstrated time and again – they are a platform closed to conservatives. And it appears average people – finally – are beginning to not like the inherent unfairness of it all.”

Reprinted with author’s permission from Accuracy in Media