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Catherine Salgado
Catherine Salgado is a Staff Writer with Media Research Center’s NewsBusters’ Free Speech America. She also has a column, Washington’s Bayonette, on The Rogue Review and her own SubStack newsletter, Pro Deo et Libertate. Catherine previously wrote for The National Pulse and is a graduate of Christendom College with a degree in Classical Languages and Theology.
Eight U.S. Big Tech companies are partnered with the globalist, anti-free speech World Economic Forum.
Eight major U.S. Big Tech companies, including Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft, are partnered with the World Economic Forum (WEF), which is gearing up for its 27-29 June summer conference, “Annual Meeting of the New Champions” in Tianjin, a city in communist China, MRC Free Speech America found.
The conference theme is “Entrepreneurship: The Driving Force of the Global Economy” with focuses that include “energy transition” and “safeguarding nature and climate.”
In addition to hosting the conference in a country notorious for its autocratic censorship and surveillance, WEF has also invited Xin Baoan, a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) asset, to co-chair the event. Xin Baoan is Executive Chairman of the State Grid Corporation of China. As the name makes clear, State Grid is owned by the Communist Chinese government.
The World Economic Forum is infamous for its initiative “The Great Reset”. It previously detailed its vision for the future in a piece titled, “Welcome To 2030: I Own Nothing, Have No Privacy And Life Has Never Been Better.” WEF’s utopia would include AI and robots replacing many jobs, no private ownership or transportation, and intense surveillance: “somewhere, everything I do, think and dream of is recorded. I just hope that nobody will use it against me.” Are U.S. tech companies aligned with WEF’s vision here?
WEF is also openly anti-free speech. In October 2022, WEF published a piece from Oliver Wyman Forum CEO John Romeo. The piece mourned the “declining trust in mainstream information sources” and supported censorship, claiming that, “Governments, business and individuals must work together to reduce the spread of disinformation.” Again, in January 2023, WEF hosted a panel during its Davos conference, moderated by now-fired CNN host Brian Stelter, titled, “The Clear and Present Danger of Disinformation.” Panel participants pushed for “pre-bunking” (i.e. censoring) content. WEF is also partnered with Open Society Foundations, the network of insidious, anti-free speech leftist billionaire George Soros. U.S. tech companies should stand for free speech, not assist a pro-censorship organization.
Below are eight major U.S. tech giants partnered with WEF, many of them with their own anti-free speech track record:
Both Google and Google-owned YouTube have a history of restrictive censorship. A YouTube executive bragged in October 2021 during Congressional testimony that the platform had removed over a million videos for supposed COVID-19 “misinformation.” YouTube later quietly updated its COVID-19 policy after multiple censored claims turned out to be true. The platform also got a new CEO, Neal Mohan, in February 2023, but Mohan is just as anti-free speech as his predecessor. Google, meanwhile, has manipulated its search engine results with an overtly leftist bias. MRC Free Speech America studies showed that Google boosted Democrats and downgraded Republicans before the 2022 election. Google also rushed its artificial intelligence projects so fast that Geoffrey Hinton, the “godfather of AI,” quit Google in concern. Google banned pro-free speech app Parler from its Play Store in 2021.
Meta’s platforms Facebook and Instagram also have a history of heavy censorship. As of Nov. 2021, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg claimed his company had removed about 20 million COVID-19-related posts. Zuckerberg also confessed to censoring the bombshell Hunter Biden laptop scandal after FBI priming weeks before the 2020 presidential election. Censorship of the Hunter Biden scandal helped steal the 2020 election for Joe Biden, a Media Research Center poll found. In January 2023, The Facebook Files also helped expose Facebook’s and Instagram’s collusion with the U.S. federal government to censor speech online.
LinkedIn censors free speech, often with impunity. Microsoft-owned LinkedIn has been censoring free speech for years, most recently GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, though it often garners less attention for its censorship than other social media platforms. Critiques of climate change, COVID-19, and China are the platform’s most censored topics. Its co-founder Reid Hoffman has ignored the increasing risks of AI, pushing for faster AI development with the claim that the new technology is “the realization of [a] dream.”
Microsoft is not only anti-free speech but invested in risky AI. As noted above, Microsoft-owned LinkedIn has an anti-free speech history. Microsoft is also heavily invested in AI. The company announced a project in April with OpenAI to unleash biased ChatGPT on medical records. Microsoft founder Bill Gates has even endorsed technology for authoritarian surveillance to help enforce global medical measures.
Amazon not only exercises censorship, it partnered with a radical leftist organization for advice. Like so many other Big Tech companies, Amazon has a history of censorship. As MRC Free Speech America’s unique CensorTrack database has demonstrated, Amazon has rejected conservative films, tried to inhibit conservative book sales by blocking ads or removing titles, and relied on left-wing, anti-Christian zealots to decide which charities qualify for its AmazonSmile program. While the company retired AmazonSmile in January 2023, it declined to state whether it would continue to use the radical leftist Southern Poverty Law Center to determine if groups will be excluded from Amazon’s charitable programs.
PayPal has exercised financial censorship of users. PayPal even cancelled some and barred them from their income. This includes biologist Colin Wright, who defended biology in the face of the left’s radicalized LGBTQ+ ideology, and anti-woke education group Moms for Liberty. PayPal also, once caught, backtracked in Oct. 2022 on an announcement that the company would fine users $2,500 for supposed “misinformation.”
Mozilla’s Foundation is anti-free speech. Mozilla, builder of the Firefox browser, runs the Mozilla Foundation. In Sept. 2020, the Mozilla Foundation announced an “open-source tool for tracking disinformation,” which is just another way of saying a censorship promoting tool. The Social Media Analysis Toolkit (SMAT) helps “activists, journalists, researchers, and other social good organizations to analyze and visualize harmful online trends such as hate, mis-, and disinformation.” SMAT, as Mozilla noted, was specifically intended for “monitoring” elections. Mozilla Firefox also provides tools and “tips for seeing less misinformation,” according to Mozilla.org. The company claims, “false information costs the global economy a lot of money and can threaten democracy and efficient governance.”
Apple is heavily invested in China and is guilty of censorship. Apple reportedly censored anti-regime protestors in China by preventing the phone airdrop function in November 2022. Apple has been proud of its various censorship actions, including banning Parler from its App Store in 2021.
These U.S. tech companies, as problematic as they already are, should not be partnered with the anti-free speech WEF, especially since WEF is aligning itself with the dictatorial and genocidal CCP.
