Fox News host Tucker Carlson condemned the unchecked power tech giants like Google have over media companies following a debacle over whether the company demonetized conservatives outlets for their coverage of recent Black Lives Matter protests.
“Most media companies are dependent on Google,” Carlson said during his show on Tuesday. “… So, if you’re in the news business, you obey Google. When Google tells you to do something, you do it. You have no choice. They can bankrupt you in a minute, and they will.”
An NBC report that came out on Tuesday falsely claimed Google banned the Federalist and conservative financial blog ZeroHedge from its ad platform after the company became aware of research about right-wing media bias and misinformation regarding recent unrest over racial injustice in the United States.
Google pushed back on the report saying it did not demonetize the Federalist and instead worked with the publication to clean up its comments section that went against its policies of using dangerous or derogatory language.
The Federalist has since temporarily removed its comments section as it negotiates a solution with the company.
Carlson viewed the move as an attack on the ability of readers to be able to express their thoughts on the content they’re consuming.
“[Google] told us that the sites maintain ‘unmoderated comment sections,'” Carlson said. “In other words, readers get to say what they want. Google finds this intolerable. Faced with destruction, the Federalist had no choice but to submit to Google. The site deleted their comment section entirely. No more saying what you think about articles on the Federalist. Google has banned that now.”
Carlson also criticized members of Congress, blaming them for allowing the tech company to grow to an unbridled size. He particularly pointed out the legal protection for tech companies known as Section 230, which doesn’t hold them liable for the content they allow online and how they decide to monitor it.
“Google says it now holds conservative web sites responsible for the comments of their readers,” Carlson said. “And yet, irony of ironies, thanks to a special carve-out Google has received from the United States Congress, something called section 230 of the Communications Decency Act … Google itself is not responsible for content on its platform because Congress says it doesn’t have to be.”
He added that a number of Republican lawmakers have sided with Google multiple times over peoples’ “constitutional right(s)” that could be threatened by the company.
“They attack any investigation of the tech companies that might have ‘preconceived conclusions that large tech companies are inherently bad or must be broken up,’” Carlson said. “They actually wrote that. Who is paying these guys? And more to the point, whose side are they on? Again, let us hope for a vigorous primary challenge to these two and any who share this view. Year in and year out, we vote for these people in the fervent hope they will stand up for us when it matters. Now, it matters. And now, like every time before, they sell us out. Time is up. Seriously, it is too much. The stakes are too high. We need better leadership, we need someone to protect us, nobody is.”
