After Being Paid Off by Big Tech for Years for their Silence Heritage Foundation Finds Itself Victim of Big Tech Censorship

Since Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 election, Big Tech in coordination with far-left groups has been working tirelessly to eliminate conservative voices and content on the internet.

The Gateway Pundit has been a prime target of this internet jihad by Big Tech. In 2016 The Gateway Pundit was the fourth most influential conservative publisher on Facebook in 2016 according to Harvard and Columbia Journalism Review studies. Since that time Facebook eliminated our reach by 90% using excuses of fake news, conspiracy, and click-bait. This is after the liberal mainstream media pushed the fake Trump-Russia collusion narrative for over three years.

Conservative publishers (who aren’t having dinner with Mark Zuckerberg) have seen their traffic from Facebook diminished by more than 90%.

If you combine the total number of page-views lost by conservative online publishers since 2017 you are looking at a loss of over 1.5 billion page-views from Facebook in one year.

Conservatives saw the same tactics used by Twitter, Google, Wikipedia and even Pinterest of eliminating and censoring conservative content.

Back in 2019 Tucker Carlson called out old-school conservative groups for working with big tech companies as they continue on a daily basis to eradicate conservative content online.

Obviously, The Heritage Foundation was outraged that they were called out by Tucker Carlson and released a response at the time.

The Hill reported:

The conservative Heritage Foundation pushed back on Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Saturday after he sharply criticized the organization during a segment on tech policy.

Carlson blasted the foundation and other groups during his show Friday night, arguing that Beltway conservative organizations have “colluded with big tech to shield left-wing monopolies from any oversight.”

In specifically going after Heritage, where Carlson used to work, the host asserted, “As an organization, Heritage no longer represents the interests of conservatives, at least on the question of tech.”

He also criticized one paper from the group, which he alleged “defends the special privileges that Congress has given to left-wing Silicon Valley monopolies.”

The foundation fired back in a statement on Saturday, accusing the television personality of making “several false, outrageous, and unfounded accusations.”

“Rather than engage in a substantive policy debate, he chose instead to make ad hominem attacks and question our integrity. We are disappointed this came from someone whom we admire and respect,” said Heritage Foundation Vice President of Communications Rob Bluey.

He added that Carlson “failed to acknowledge Heritage experts’ consistent criticism of technology companies” and defended the report’s conclusion as “based on the principles that guide all of our policy recommendations.”

But Tucker Carlson was right.
Several old-school conservative groups have been getting paid by the tech giants as conservative voices are silenced online.
Thanks to an accidental piece by The Wall Street Journal back in January we know there are several conservative organizations being paid by the tech giants as the organizations continue to censor and eliminate conservative voices.
This was outrageous and vile behavior.

Tony Perkins from Family Research Council, Grover Norquist from Americans for Tax Reform, and Kay Cole Jones from the Heritage Organization

Alphabet Inc.’s Google contributes to more than 200 third-party groups, including the Heritage Foundation, National Cyber Security Alliance, and Americans for Tax Reform.

These payments were made while the conservative bloodbath by the Tech Giants was roaring ahead.

These so-called conservative groups were being paid, essentially for their silence, as Facebook eliminated conservative content and killed off conservative publishers.

From The Wall Street Journal:

Facebook has privately sought advice from the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian public-policy group, and its founder Anthony Perkins, according to people familiar with those meetings. Twitter’s Chief Executive Jack Dorsey recently hosted dinners with conservatives, including Grover Norquist, the founder and president of Americans for Tax Reform, which advocates for lower taxes. Advisers on the left include the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil-rights group that keeps a list of hate groups…

…While outside groups are technically unpaid, the tech companies contribute to some of the organizations they are seeking out for guidance. Alphabet Inc.’s Google contributes to more than 200 third-party groups, including the Heritage Foundation, National Cyber Security Alliance, and Americans for Tax Reform, according to the company. Facebook and most other companies don’t disclose their donations to outside groups.

Executives see the outreach to a cross-section of groups in part as a form of political protection, to defend against the allegation that they are biased against conservatives, a complaint lodged repeatedly last year by President Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers. Some of the conservative groups tapped recently by tech platforms complain that the companies defer too closely to the Southern Poverty Law Center when defining what constitutes hate speech.

Many companies and other groups rely on the center’s list of hate groups, counting nearly 1,000 across the U.S., according to its website. The group also writes about some of those groups on its “Hatewatch” blog.

Keegan Hankes, a senior research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center, says the group lobbies tech platforms to remove content it considers hate speech, such as when it successfully asked Facebook to remove content posted by the League of the South, a neo-Confederate group.

Now this…

The Heritage has suddenly had a change of heart now that estimate they have lost an estimated $100 million due to Big Tech censorship. And they are joined a conservative group against censorship. President Kevin Robert even said, “Big Tech is an enemy of the American people.”

Joseph Farah at WND reported:

“Big Tech is an enemy of the American people.”

That’s not me making this claim. It’s not Donald Trump. It’s not even Steve Bannon.

It’s the conservative Heritage Foundation.

“The think tank announced this week “that it is joining the Free Speech Alliance, a coalition of more than 90 conservative organizations working together to ensure conservatives’ free speech online and to hold tech companies accountable when they undermine it.”

The only thing I would say about that statement is that it underestimates the extent of Big Tech’s undermining of free speech. They undermine it every day of the week. They undermine it twice on Sunday. They undermine it more than a billion times a second. They couldn’t possibly undermine it any more than they do. They undermine it every chance they get…

(…)

What did it take to drive the august Heritage Foundation to reach this critical decision?

In February, YouTube censored a video posted to The Daily Signal’s YouTube channel in which Virginia parent Merianne Jensen criticized unscientific and harmful school mask mandates, claiming it “violated” the platform’s “COVID-19 medical misinformation policy.” (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news site.)

Last year, Amazon removed paid ads promoting a book by Heritage senior fellow Mike Gonzalez titled, “BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution,” because content that “revolves around controversial or highly debated social topics is not permitted.” After a public pressure campaign, Amazon reversed itself and restored the ads.

In 2020, one of Heritage’s YouTube videos on gender dysphoria was censored by the company, while in 2019, The Daily Signal reported that YouTube had also removed a similar video on its YouTube channel.

And in early 2019, then-Heritage President Kay C. James was invited to be a member of Google’s new AI board, only for Google to dissolve the board after an outcry from company employees that James, a conservative, was asked to be on the board.