Back in September, the Media Research Center set up something called “Free Speech America,” which claims to be “designed to push back against Big Tech’s abuse of power.” It includes a website called CensorTrack, which claims to be “an archive of incidents of bias, as well as a resource for people interested in the issue or writing about it.” It’s designed to work with the MRC’s tech-monitoring operation that is largely responsible for pushing the increasingly bogus narrative that Twitter and Facebook are “censoring” conservative — and only conservative — websites and accounts by enforcing their terms of service against extremism.
It was a momentous enough occasion that the MRC’s “news” division, CNSNews.com, was called in to do an article on it. Managing editor Michael W. Chapman did his corporate duty, uncritically quoting his boss, Brent Bozell, dishonestly declaring that “Every platform coming out of Silicon Valley today is censoring conservatives. … Our position is, if they can do it to the president of the United States, they can do it to anyone, and in fact that is exactly what’s happening. And it’s starting to happen worldwide to conservatives.”
Interestingly, a guest on the Zoom call at which the initiative was annouced was Robert Epstein, whose dubious research pushing the narrative that Google uses its search results to push anti-conservative bias has been embraced by the MRC. So much for Epstein’s defense that he’s a Hillary Clinton supporter.
But we didn’t see any evidence that CensorTrack has tracked the “censoring” of our Twitter feed — even after we asked nicely to be put on it — because we accurately quoted Rush Limbaugh’s smear of Sandra Fluke. Of course, the mere existence of that blows a hole in the MRC’s narrative.
Speaking of destroying a narrative: The Twitter page for the Free Speech America operation has, uh, censored us, as the above screenshot shows. How strange for a new operation to pre-block us, we thought — but the page states that it was created in October 2010, which tells us it’s simply a renamed page.
Still, it’s a bad look for an operation that purports to be all about “free speech” that’s trying to silence its critics.