Despite his headline-grabbing indictment of Russian nationals for interfering with the U.S. election, special counsel Robert Mueller found no evidence of collusion between any Russians and the Trump campaign. Mueller indicted 13 Russians who apparently operated a “troll farm” in St. Petersburg, Russia’s second-largest city, purchasing ads on Facebook and sending provocative messages to Americans through social media.
According to the indictment, the Russian effort to sow turmoil, confusion, and division started in 2014, well before Trump announced he was running for president.
The 13 Russians will never be extradited to face trial in the United States; the indictments are merely a political ploy by Mueller. The bigger question is whether our social media services such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter will respond to the indictments by ramping up their own censoring of political speech on their platforms.
Already, Facebook has announced it will hire 10,000 employees tasked with policing “hate speech” on its pages. But the toxic label “hate speech” is likely to be used as a pretext to impose a politically correct ideology on millions of unsuspecting users.
No one denies that Facebook, Google, and Twitter are among the most liberal corporations in America. Virtually all their executives and most of their senior staff were avid supporters of Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders, and detest Donald Trump.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg chairs a pro-amnesty lobbying group called Fwd.us whose primary mission is to oppose Donald Trump’s efforts to secure the border. Facebook’s number two executive, Sheryl Sandberg, was spotted in Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s leaked emails writing that “I still want HRC to win badly. I am still here to help as I can.”
The only prominent figure in tech who is known to have supported Trump for president is Peter Thiel, an early investor in Facebook and a member of its board of directors. After beating back an effort to remove him from Facebook’s board for the heresy of supporting Trump, Peter Thiel announced he is moving both his home and his investment company to Los Angeles because he can no longer tolerate the suffocating politics of the Bay Area.
