Tech bias has been a longtime concern for the right, and Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s former chief strategist, frequently mentioned it. Little came of it.
Now the movement is finding more mainstream allies. Mr. Kirk and others who have complained of an anti-conservative bias by Facebook, Google and Twitter attended a social media summit at the White House on Thursday. At the event, Mr. Trump accused the companies of exhibiting “terrible bias” and said he was calling representatives from all of them to the White House over the next month.
On Friday, Mr. Trump took the tech companies to task again, calling them “crooked” and “dishonest” and adding that “something is going to be done.”
“In my circles right now,” Mr. Pethokoukis said, “if you say, ‘I don’t think we’re seeing systemic bias against conservatives,’ it’s like they wonder about your sanity.”
Matt Stoller, a former Democratic congressional staff member who is now at the antimonopoly think tank Open Markets Institute, which leans liberal, said he noticed the same thing.
“The white supremacists liked to appropriate this language around antimonopoly and free speech,” said Mr. Stoller, who has written a book on the antimonopoly movement, “Goliath.” “But now there are real networks on the right that are not white supremacist networks, and the people in them are genuinely concerned about the power of Big Tech.”
He said he was having to reassess his relationships with conservatives.
“I always knew we were aiming at different things,” he said. “Now, we have some of the same goals.”
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/14/technology/big-tech-strange-bedfellows.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
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