Is Big Tech acting like a Cult?

On October 14th The New York Post dropped a bombshell article yesterday revealing Hunter Biden’s emails proving he was using his father, Joe Biden’s, name and influence on behalf of Ukrainian and Chinese companies in exchange for money and that Joe was well aware of his scheme going on at the time.

In response to this act of journalism, Big Tech companies like Facebook, and Twitter decided that they could, without any evidence to debunk the story, block it from being posted as not suitable for the public to see on their websites. 

These are the exact same companies who claim not to be publishers engineering the content on their sites, but platforms freely allowing users to post content while following rules that fairly apply to everyone. Well that argument has clearly suffered a fatal blow in the past 24 hours.

Twitter especially has had no problem allowing articles from other mainstream sources that allege President Donald Trump or a political figure on the right did or said something with no shred of substantial evidence to back it up past unnamed sources. If Hunter Biden is proved with hard evidence to have had his father meet with Ukrainian oligarchs then the information is suddenly “hacked material” or “illegally obtained” without any evidence to prove it.

In order to understand the mentality that leads to the executives of Twitter and their (health and safety team) thinking that they could censor a major story in front of Hundreds of millions of people, and that it would be seen as socially acceptable, we have to look at the makeup of these companies.

The offices of places like Twitter and Facebook by nature will be made up of Intelligent, successful tech engineers and executives who see themselves as generally pretty smart people, who aspire to do good.  It is likely that they do not see the place they work as an evil entity, as Twitter does not have any world domination seminars. 

It’s also likely that the very majority of Twitter employees are not radical Social Justice Warriors, the real problem is the social homogeneity.  Studies show that if you put a group of people with moderate, but similar political views together over time they will become more polarized. So when tech companies drive off employees with dissenting opinions like James Demore it creates an environment prone to groupthink. 

What we are seeing in Silicon Valley is an insular social ecosystems developing. However, because social media companies inherently deal with the opinions of hundreds of millions of people it creates the perception that they actually engage with a much larger segment of society. This leads to a misrepresentation of the frequency of their personal political views being represented in the wider population.  

To compound this problem, Twitter has a features that specifically allow those they deem worthy of being verified members and receiving a blue check mark to only be notified of their interactions with other blue check marked individuals. This creates a separate ecosystem of “twitter elites” that tend to be ideologically aligned with the very staff at Twitter that selected them, causing a social feedback loop between the two.

This has been developing over years now within Big Tech that we are now at a point that when the political values of their institutions are challenged there will be hardliners who lash out and others who will not counter them for fear of losing their place in the company.  

The focus on politics by the censors at Big Tech makes a lot of sense, as politics in some ways is an expression of both one’s intelligence and morality.  Both of those are important to the ideological foundation of people who have decided to be the arbitrators and distributors of truth in the Western Anglosphere, and strangely nowhere else.

The inconsistency of Twitter’s behaviour shows just how niche their ideology is.  They locked out White House Press Secretary Kayleigh Mcenany from her account over the Hunter Biden story, yet the Ayatollah, a man who runs a country that bans access to Twitter for its citizens, is allowed to make threats against other nations on Twitter.

Joe Biden being shown to have known about corrupt behaviour by his son and taken part in is seen as somehow false to the elites of Big Tech as the political culture they live within assumes that information that hurts Biden or the Democrats must be wrong in some way. Since Trump is bad, seems to be an ideological foundation, and justification for almost any action in the mentality of Big Tech trust and safety teams.

This causes many to readily accept an infallibility logical fallacy in order to protect their closely held beliefs. This is why unsubstantiated reports from anonymous sources about Trump are accepted as gospel truth, while actual evidence regarding corruption on the part of Biden is considered compromised because it was at one point given over to Rudy Guliani, therefore making its contents worthy of censorship.

To call Big Tech companies a cult might be a bit hyperbolic for now, but there are definitely signs of cult like behaviour and groupthink increasing within these companies, and the problem is only growing.  With these entities having their fingers so heavily pressed on the scales of public discourse, we need to be very concerned about the problems in Silicon Valley metastasizing and infecting the rest of the country.