Dan Gainor has been tracking bias and censorship on Big Tech platforms since 2014 when the issue was in its infancy.
Now, it’s at the forefront of the political conversation, and the former journalist, along with his organization, the Media Research Center, is trying to make the case for conservative reform of social media platforms by documenting their alleged bias against the Right.
The Media Research Center was founded in 1987 by conservative activist Brent Bozell III to call out bias within mainstream media organizations, mostly thanks to funding from wealthy conservatives like billionaire Robert Mercer.
Gainor is vice president at the center and heads up TechWatch, its operation to track anti-conservative bias and censorship on Big Tech platforms.
In an interview with the Washington Examiner, Gainor said he started tracking the issue of online censorship for the MRC by himself in 2014 during the Gamergate online harassment controversy and now has 10 people working under him on the matter.
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Thanks to additional funding and support from Bozell in 2020, the center even launched a website called CensorTrack, which Gainor said has documented over 2,000 examples of censorship or bias in the past year.
Gainor said he was inspired to track online speech issues by Nat Hentoff, a libertarian columnist and social commentator who was a vocal defender of free speech. And he was drawn into social media, and Twitter in particular, by journalist Robert Bluey from the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.
Currently, there is only anecdotal proof of anti-conservative bias and censorship online, not systemic evidence, Gainor said. However, he said this is because social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are not transparent about whom they censor and why.
“Until Facebook and Twitter open up their books and show us their algorithms and internal data on who they censor, we have to just look at the examples publicly gathered,” said Gainor.
Gainor said that prominent examples of anti-Republican or conservative bias on Big Tech platforms recently include: former President Donald Trump’s widespread social media bans; the suppression of a New York Post story about Hunter Biden before the 2020 election; social media platform Parler being banned by Amazon, Apple, and Google earlier this year; and Google suppressing conservative news outlets in search results in the past few years.
Democrats and liberals challenge conservative allegations of online bias, citing studies that have concluded that social media companies don’t discriminate against conservatives and that the anti-conservative censorship claims are a form of disinformation or falsehood.
“No trustworthy large-scale studies have determined that conservative content is being removed for ideological reasons. Even anecdotal evidence of supposed bias tends to crumble under close examination,” a report by the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights said.
Instead, the study said that conservative content is holding its own and often performs better on popular social media platforms than posts created by mainstream or left-wing voices.
Gainor dismissed the NYU study as inaccurate and instead highlighted that the MRC receives hundreds of examples, on some days, of anti-conservative bias from social media users. He said the center receives at least a handful of complaints regarding unfair censorship every day, mostly from prominent conservative organizations and influencers and sometimes from everyday users.
A native of Maryland, Gainor said many conservative organizations and individuals are upset with social media platforms because they are worried about being cut off from large communities online that they have spent years building up.
“MRC has 13 million followers on Facebook, we devoted enormous resources to build that, a ton of time and effort. So we’re complaining because that could be taken away from us at any point like others have seen,” said Gainor, citing the recent Twitter ban of media organization Project Veritas and its founder, James O’Keefe.
Gainor said that conservatives have already started leaving social media giants such as Facebook and Twitter for smaller, more free-speech-oriented platforms, including Gab, Parler, Locals, Rumble, and others.
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“Big Tech platforms are forcing us to scatter and go to new platforms so they don’t have to play whack-a-mole when we put up content they don’t like,” Gainor said.
