NBC Tries to Cancel a Conservative Website The network colluded with a foreign advocacy group that wanted Google to demonetize the Federalist. By Ben Domenech and Sean Davis
https://www.wsj.com/articles/nbc-tries-to-cancel-a-conservative-website-11592410893?mod=opinion_lead_pos5
NBC News attempted this week to use the power of Google to cancel our publication, the Federalist. The effort failed, but it should serve as a warning about the unchecked power of big tech companies, particularly when they can be manipulated by partisans, including partisan journalists.
On Monday we received a request for comment through our general media email account from NBC reporter Adele-Momoko Fraser. The message asserted that Google had demonetized our site—preventing us from earning money through Google ads—for violating its rules.
On Tuesday, NBC published an article claiming that Google had made a formal decision to demonetize the Federalist, that we had been formally warned that we were in violation, and that our content—specifically, articles criticizing the Black Lives Matter movement and media coverage of recent riots—was a violation of Google’s rules.
Google subsequently sent a statement to NBC saying all these claims were false. The network updated but hasn’t retracted the story. Ms. Fraser, who works for an NBC division with the Orwellian name “Verification Center,” tweeted her story and expressing thanks for the “hard work and collaboration” of a London-based advocacy group, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which promptly issued a fundraising appeal based on its purported deplatforming of a conservative media organization.
Whatever the network or the center knew about Google and the Federalist, it was more than Google told us. Google never formally notified us that we had run afoul of any of its rules. Only when we sought guidance from Google about the NBC News story were we told that our comments section—which is run by a third party and isn’t monitored or moderated by us—violated its policies. We asked if adjusting the comments section would address the alleged rule violation and were told that it would. For now our comment section doesn’t appear on our site. We intend to bring it back.
NBC News colluded with a foreign left-wing group in an attempt to destroy us because it disagrees with our political commentary and media criticism. The episode illustrates how dangerous the combination of partisan media and monopolistic tech companies is to America. We survived the attack because our organization is well-known.
This is only the latest example of media outlets using social-media platforms to attack and destroy Americans who don’t kowtow to left-wing orthodoxy. Ask Brendan Eich, who was fired from a Silicon Valley job in 2014 for contributing to a referendum against same-sex marriage six years earlier, or Nicholas Sandmann, who at age 16 was labeled a bigot by journalists for CNN and other outlets for attending a pro-life rally in D.C. and politely staying silent while an adult berated him and his classmates.
These attacks target not only individuals but free speech itself.
Messrs. Domenech and Davis are co-founders of The Federalist.
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