These two platforms have been used time and time again, he says, to foment all kinds of illicit activity, and yet nothing has been done because those committing said crimes are leftists. Following the Capitol "invasion," however, which was blamed on "Trump supporters," there is a newfound interest in cracking down on free speech – but only conservative free speech on "alternative" platforms like Gab and Parler.
Facebook, it turns out, was the platform that was actually used by the so-called "insurrectionists" to organize their Jan. 6 "siege." The same is true of Twitter, which is routinely used for organizing riots and even exchanging child pornography.
Not only has nothing been done to either of these two companies, but their corporate heads are blaming their competitors for what is happening on their own platforms.
Facebook's Chief Operation Officer, Sharyl Sandberg, for example, issued a statement deflecting all blame from her company and shifting it onto Gab, which is not even available for download in Apple's App Store or Google's Play App Store. Gab also has a tiny fraction of the user base that Facebook has, and likely played no role in the Capitol "riot."
The far-left Washington Post, if you can believe it, truthfully reported on what Torba calls "a mountain of evidence" implicating Facebook, not Gab, in the "siege." The New York Times, which had initially blamed Gab and Parler, changed its tune following the Post report.
"The legacy press and activist groups such as the Anti-Defamation League, each also blamed two challenger sites – Gab and Parler – rather than the big sites like Twitter and Facebook where rioters actually planned their activities," Torba notes.
If actual usage patterns are to be used as a metric, then Facebook and Twitter are far and away the most offensive platforms out there in terms of facilitating domestic terrorism. And yet they are both untouchable, even as their competitors are monopolistically targeted for removal.
"The reality of app store bans is and always has been that Big Tech moderation policies are selectively applied," Torba explains about Silicon Valley's antitrust behavior.
"Big Tech responds not to reality but to the demands of far-left activists who clog the proverbial phone lines of Apple and Google every time a handful of offensive or illegal posts appears on our sites, while ignoring when hundreds of thousands of illegal or offensive posts appears on theirs."
Recognizing this glaring double standard, Torba and his team have launched what they call the "Liberal Hate Machine" project, which tracks the tens of millions of illegal posts from leftists on Twitter and Facebook that are never censored or removed, even as conservative speech is routinely targeted for removal under "community standards" rules.
"We have been collecting and analyzing over 100 million tweets in the replies section of President Trump's Twitter account for about a year," Torba writes. "We applied sentiment analysis to detect violent and hateful replies. Wait until you see what we found."
Torba further contends that Big Tech could not care less about "principles" or so-called "community standards," and is really only concerned with serving the interests of the radical left and the Democratic Party.
"They can't say it out loud so they say it with their actions," he warns.
To keep up with the latest news about Big Tech censorship, be sure to check out Censorship.news.
Sources for this article include: