Big Tech Bias Could Get Much Worse For Conservative News

This week, President Trump took to social medial to complain about the blatant conservative bias from the largest technology companies.  While the President was focused on Twitter, every big tech company has shown a tendency to discriminate against conservatives. 

Twitter has shadow banned prominent Republicans and conservative pundits.  Facebook branded Trump supporters Diamond and Silk as “Unsafe for the Community” and Google recently labeled the pro-life movie Unplanned “propaganda” in its search results.

The conservative bias is unfair, and it is wrong, but it pales in comparison to big tech’s ultimate goal: to force all advertising on the internet to run through their platforms.  A move that would force conservative news sites to begin sharing their ad revenue with the very companies that are biased against them.

Google and Facebook—the Duopoly—control 63% of all digital ad spending in the US according to the State of Digital Media. Next 5 are also massive tech companies (Amazon, Microsoft, Oath, Twitter, and Snap) and they control another 12%.

Everyone outside these digital goliaths only has 25% of digital ad revenue in the U.S., a share that is shrinking because Google and Facebook account for 90% of all new digital ad revenue

Big Tech companies have already ravaged the print media business.  Newspapers across the United States are closing their doors entirely or moving to online only distribution. News publishers have lost tens of billions in revenue and tens of thousands of journalists have lost their jobs while Google and Facebook have padded their wallets and enriched their founders.  

Now online publishing is under threat from big tech.  Google could begin blocking third party cookies.  Third party cookies are nothing more than small anonymized data files that allow digital publishers serve advertisements to website visitors. 

Third party cookies are an essential part of the digital media value chain.  They enable highly relevant advertising to consumers, which in turn provides the necessary revenue for digital publishers to offer relevant content for free on the internet.

If Google has its way, instead of being able to sell their own advertising conservative news sites could be forced to sell their advertising inventory through Google and Facebook’s ad platforms.  Such a change would be nice for big tech’s profit margins, but it would force digital publishers to share an increasingly larger share of their revenues with Google, and only Google. 

Google will try to convince legislators that this change is in the interest of ‘privacy’ but we all know better.  Google’s privacy argument is nothing but a strawman intended to district for their real interest, market domination.