AG Bill Barr: “Clearly” the Social Media Giants are “Engaged in Censorship” (VIDEO)

Attorney General Bill Barr joined Bret Baier on Special Report and said he “clearly” believes the social media giants are “engaged in censorship” and are acting like “publishers.

FOX News reported:

Attorney General William Barr told “Special Report” in the second part of an exclusive interview that aired Tuesday that he believes social media platforms are “engaged in censorship” and are acting more like “publishers”.

“So you think these [social media] firms are somehow censoring the president and his supporters?” host Bret Baier asked Barr.

“I think there are — clearly these, these entities are now engaged in censorship,” Barr responded. “And they originally held themselves out as open forums where people, where the third parties could come and express their views and they built up a tremendous network of eyeballs.

“They had a lot of market power based on that presentation,” the attorney general added. “And now they are acting much more like publishers because they’re censoring particular viewpoints and putting their own content in there to to diminish the impact of various people’s views.”

Just two weeks ago President Trump signed an executive order regarding social media and big technology companies.

The order comes on the heels of a illicit fact-check on the president from Twitter, related to President Trump’s sentiment regarding voting by mail.
Twitter’s fact-check was later revealed to be fake news.

President Trump directed the Attorney General to work with states to enforce their laws against deceptive business practices.

President Trump made his announcement from the Oval Office.

President Trump told reporters what the social media giants are doing is tantamount to a monopoly.
Via KVIA:

“A small handful of social media monopolies controls a vast portion of all public and private communications in the United States,” he alleged.

“They’ve had unchecked power to censor, restrict, edit, shape, hide, alter, virtually any form of communication between private citizens and large public audiences. ”

UPDATE: Here is the full transcript to the White House executive order:

Facebook has been shutting down traffic to conservative websites since the 2016 election.

Conservatives dominated social media in 2016 when they were able to get the truth out – uncensored. Facebook ended that in 2017 and 2018.

The Gateway Pundit spoke with two of the top conservative publishers in America last year.

Here at The Gateway Pundit our Facebook traffic was decimated after we were ranked as the 4th most influential conservative publisher in the 2016 election.

We were supportive of President Trump so Facebook was forced to act.

The fact that Facebook is targeting conservative publishers should not be a surprise to Gateway Pundit readers.

We have been reporting on this for several months years now.

This influence map below by Columbia Journalism Review shows the top Facebook influencers during the 2016 election.

And here is that same map showing the conservative publishers who have been targeted by Facebook since 2017.

Facebook has eliminated content from a vast majority of top conservative publishers since 2017.

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Jim Hoft is the founder and editor of The Gateway Pundit, one of the top conservative news outlets in America. Jim was awarded the Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award in 2013 and is the proud recipient of the Breitbart Award for Excellence in Online Journalism from the Americans for Prosperity Foundation in May 2016. In 2023, The Gateway Pundit received the Most Trusted Print Media Award at the American Liberty Awards.

You can email Jim Hoft here, and read more of Jim Hoft's articles here.

 

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