How people choose to spend their money is a good indicator of where their heart lies. And in the world of big tech and social-media giants, their political spending tells us all we need to know about their claims of being unbiased and their efforts to protect the integrity of elections.
Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings show that the folks in Silicon Valley lean heavily Democrat. Employees of the three most influential tech companies — Google, Facebook and Twitter — have contributed $2.4 million dollars to political candidates ahead of the 2018 midterm elections. Of that amount, only $176,000 — less than eight percent — has gone to Republican candidates.
In the previous midterm cycle in 2014, such giving was also skewed in favor of Democrats, but the margins have grown substantially. In 2014, employees of the three companies gave $838,000 in campaign contributions, with Republicans receiving just over 30 percent of those donations.
“It’s interesting to see that employees of the tech world are giving substantially more donations to Democrats than Republicans but not shocking, given many of these employees likely reside in blue states and the nature of the industry’s employees — educated, higher income — and because many of these employees may be affected by policies that are in the news right now like immigration to education,” said campaign finance specialist Karen Sebold of the University of Arkansas.
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Google vice president Jason Spero admitted to CNBC back in May that his own political involvement has grown since the 2016 election of Donald Trump. “I’d never been as aware, awake and active as I had been since that November,” Spero said.
In Spero’s case, he and other Silicon Valley employees in California are spending heavily in favor of Democrats in an attempt to return control of the House of Representatives to Nancy Pelosi and company. And the employees are venturing well outside their own districts in their spending, as Silicon Valley is already deep blue, having voted overwhelmingly for Clinton in 2016. Most of their spending has been focused on getting retiring Darrell Issa’s longtime Republican seat and the eight other Republican seats considered vulnerable in the state.
Spero has even begun hosting fundraising events in his home. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard, ‘I’ve never been to a political event before,’” Spero told CNBC. “The hypothesis of the events was that a lot of people were motivated but didn’t know what to do with that energy.”
So, the FEC’s filings prove that politically active employees of the three most influential big tech companies in America have a strong leftist bias. So what? What do the actions of the companies themselves say? After all, all three entities have denied any political bias in how they do business.
Back in July, President Donald Trump accused Twitter of “shadow banning” conservatives. “Twitter ‘SHADOW BANNING’ prominent Republicans,” the President tweeted. “Not good. We will look into this discriminatory and illegal practice at once! Many complaints.”
Shadow banning is the practice of hiding conservative voices in the search results so that they become more difficult to find. James O’Keefe of Project Veritas released a video of Twitter employees admitting to the practice.
Facebook and Google say that they have both begun efforts to assure the integrity of elections, but how can we trust groups with such an obvious financial bias toward Democrats to ensure the integrity of elections? The fox is guarding the henhouse.
Of course, to those of us who have paid any attention at all over the past two years, this news is not surprising. Silicon Valley and the large social-media companies have proven their leftist bias time and time again with their demonetization of conservative videos, their hiding of search results that favor conservatives, and their outright banning of voices such as Alex Jones.
So, it’s not surprising but it is deeply concerning for an obvious reason. Social media such as Facebook and Twitter have, for better or worse, literally changed the way we communicate with each other. These days, family members are more inclined to check a relative’s Facebook page for news rather than speak with them directly. So when a intolerant leftist monopoly holds sway over the type of communication is allowed on its platform, it is not just a case of an individual company allowing what it wants in its own business; it is a First Amendment issue.
Photo: Clipart.com
