If you put my name into the Twitter search function, you won’t find my profile or my tweets (or not at least without a great deal of sleuthing, far beyond the time I’m willing to commit). I’ve been shadow-banned for weeks.
If you put my name into Google, nothing on my main website, LukeFord.net, will come up. None of the thousands of pages of the site will come up in any search. My website has been completely banned by Google.
When I turned realistic in 2014, Adsense stopped allowing my site Lukeford.net into its network (though it would serve ads on my other — less controversial — sites).
A few years ago, I had an account with Google for an email address, a series of blogs and a video channel and with one decision without the possibility of appeal, they deleted and close down all of it (claiming a violation of Terms of Service for copyright infringement) and there went a hundred of hours of my (admittedly sloppy) work.
I am not an innocent party here. A friend says: “Luke, you regularly post other people’s articles in full. It’s not surprising AdSense banned you etc. Even this post ends with someone else’s article. I remember seeing a review of one of your books on Amazon. The person complained you post massive quotes.”
Twitter repeatedly makes me change my passwords — for my own security! — over the past two months and every time I log in these days, they send me an annoying email:
We noticed a recent login for your account @lukeford.
DEVICE Chrome on Windows
LOCATION Los Angeles, CA
IF THIS WAS YOU
Great! There’s nothing else you need to do.
IF THIS WASN’T YOU
Your account may have been compromised and you should take a few steps to make sure your account is secure…
So I get this email on average three times a day.
On Facebook, I got suspended for 24 hours recently for retweeting a positive reference to Milo’s “Dangerous Faggot tour.” Any mention of “faggot” will get removed from Facebook, and the second mention will get you a 24-hour ban and the penalties escalate from there.
The clear goal of companies such as Twitter, Google, Apple, Facebook, etc, is to make life as difficult as possible for people with views they dislike, such as America First.
Tech Companies Apple, Twitter, Google and Instagram Collude to Defeat Trump
There is no such thing as Pro-Trump free speech as Clinton corporate allies serve up a carefully curated view of the campaign
By Liz Crokin • 08/12/16 8:30am
My dad always told me that conservative candidates have to work twice as hard as their liberal opponents to win elections because they’re fighting two opponents: the Democratic Party and the media.
The usual suspects from left-leaning major media outlets like The New York Times, MSNBC, CNN and even entertainment networks are doing everything in their power to ensure a Clinton victory. Look no further than to Wolf Blitzer mincing around and drinking wine at the Democratic convention, celebrating Hillary’s nomination. But the propaganda skewing this election runs much deeper than just the media: our iPhones, iPads, social media networks, Google and even video games are all in the tank for Hillary Clinton—and it’s chilling.
I began looking into how strong the bias and censorship runs in these forums after I did an interview on the pro-Trump podcast, MAGAPod. The show’s host, Mark Hammond, was disappointed Apple wouldn’t run his show without an “explicit” warning. Hammond’s podcast didn’t contain content that would be deemed explicit under Apple’s policy, and most other shows in the News & Politics category aren’t labeled as such.
On June 18, Hammond talked to Sandra, a representative from Apple. She explained that, since the description of his show is pro-Trump, his show is explicit in nature—because the subject matter is Donald Trump. So, an Apple employee concluded the Republican presidential candidate is explicit.
iTunes has dozens of podcasts discussing Osama Bin Laden and Adolf Hitler—none of which is marked explicit. I encouraged Hammond to contact Apple again, via email to their podcast support team. Within 48 hours he received a response from “Tim,” who informed Hammond that his podcast would be updated to “clean” within 24 hours.
Further digging on Apple revealed more evidence that the computer giant is feeding users pro-Hillary and anti-Trump propaganda.
Over the past year, Apple twice refused to publish a satirical Clinton Emailgate game, “Capitol HillAwry,” claiming it was “offensive” and “mean spirited” even though the game’s developer, John Matze, cited in communications with Apple that the game fits the standards of Apple’s own satire policy. Apple has, however, approved dozens of games poking fun at Donald Trump—including a game called “Dump Trump,” which depicts the GOP nominee as a giant turd.
On July 25, Breitbart exposed this blatant double standard and favoritism toward Clinton. A few days after the article was released, Apple caved and published Capitol HillAwry, 15 months after Matze’s first attempt to go live.
While it’s commendable that Apple resolved both situations, Trump supporters and conservative users should never have faced such biased treatment in the first place.
Around the same time I was a guest on MAGAPod, a friend complained to me about how biased his Apple News feed is against Trump. I set up an Apple News account on my iPhone.
First step: select an outlet. Fox News. Conservative. But my news feed? Liberal.
And if there are articles above the fold from more right-leaning sites? They paint Trump in a negative light and Hillary in a positive light. Of all the channels listed in the Apple News politics section, only two of the 16 arguably lean right—the rest are reliably left-wing.
This has, of course, been pointed out before, and anyone with an iPhone or iPad can go to Apple News to determine on his or her own if Apple is pushing leftist propaganda. Apple claims not to endorse candidates, but their actions suggest otherwise, and some of their executives—including CEO Tim Cook—actively support Clinton’s campaign. Buzzfeed recently obtained an invitation to a private $50,000-per-plate fundraiser Cook is hosting for Clinton with his Apple colleague, Lisa Jackson, at the end of this month.
Apple isn’t the only corporation doing Clinton’s bidding. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said Clinton made a deal with Google and that the tech giant is “directly engaged” in her campaign. It’s been widely reported Clinton hired Eric Schmidt—chairman of Alphabet, the parent company of Google—to set up a tech company called The Groundwork. Assange claims this was to ensure Clinton had the “engineering talent to win the election.” He also pointed out that many members of Clinton’s staff have worked for Google, and some of her former employees now work at Google.
So it should come as no surprise that there have been multiple reports accusing Google of manipulating searches to bury negative stories about Clinton. SourceFed details how Google alters its auto-complete functions to paint Clinton in a positive light.
For example, when you type “Hillary Clinton cri” into other engines like Yahoo! or Bing, the most popular autofills are “Hillary Clinton criminal charges” but in Google it’s “Hillary Clinton crime reform.” Google denies they changed their algorithm to help Clinton, and insists the company does not favor any candidate. They also claim their algorithms don’t show predicted queries that are offensive or disparaging.
But Google has gotten into hot water on multiple occasions for connecting Trump to Adolf Hitler. In June, when users searched “when Hitler was born” it generated the expected information on Hitler but also an image of Trump. In July, searches for Trump’s book, Crippled America, returned images of Adolf Hitler’s manifesto Mein Kampf. Google has since fixed both—but again, why do these issues always conveniently disparage Trump and help Clinton?
Twitter is another culprit. The company has gotten a lot of slack for banning conservatives and Trump supporters such as Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos and, most recently, rapper Azealia Banks after she came out in support of Trump. Twitter has provided vague answers as to why conservative voices have been banned while they’ve allowed other users to call for the killing of cops.
