Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow discussed the impact of Big Tech censorship and its control over the flow of digital information on Wednesday’s edition of Larry Elder’s eponymous radio program.
“If you are controlling the news — if you’re controlling the information people read — you’re controlling hearts and minds, and in my opinion, you’re controlling the vote,” Marlow determined.
Facebook’s “news tab” is primarily curated by the company’s own selected “team of journalists” despite being marketed as a personalized and organic news consumption experience based on users’ individual preferences.
Marlow said, “[The Facebook] news tab is largely going to be exactly the same, pretty much from person to person. So your feed — if you’re just logging in as yourself or on your page for the Larry Elder Show — then that is going be something that’ll be somewhat tailored to you, though again, they’re tricky with that. The news tab is something that they put out [framed as] the biggest stories going on, and they’re favoring the establishment media.”
Marlow recalled a recent report from the Wall Street Journal revealing Facebook’s suppression of Breitbart News’s reach across its platform via algorithmic manipulation.
“The Wall Street Journal put out an article that I believe was designed to sort of be a hit piece on Breitbart, but it turned out to reveal that Facebook had diminished our traffic by 20 percent,” he remarked. “In the meantime, they’re boosting other people’s traffic just simply by changing their algorithms to take away the content their own users want. Just remember that. They were engaging with Breitbart’s content, and they had to change the algorithm to diminish us.”
Marlow said Breitbart News experienced the most significant reduction in traffic on Facebook relative to other conservative news media outlets following the technology giant’s recent change to its algorithms.
“We’re regarded as the biggest threat to the establishment, for whatever reason, which I’m quite proud of,” he said of Breitbart News.
He said, “I do believe that there’s a role for breaking up some of these companies when they get too big. Unfortunately, the government’s the last resort, but they’re just monopolizing information, and now they’re censoring the facts and promoting what I believe are falsehoods.”
Marlow concluded, “Whoever controls the information controls the electorate.”
