U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said Google’s recent actions involving The Federalist, a conservative publication, raises serious concerns that the tech giant is abusing its power to censor political speech it disagrees with, Fox News reports.
NBC News reported Tuesday that Google “banned” The Federalist and ZeroHedge, another right-leaning website, from Google Ads for “pushing unsubstantiated claims” about the Black Lives Matter movement.
“To be clear, The Federalist is not currently demonetized,” Google later clarified in a statement. “We do have strict publisher policies that govern the content ads can run on, which includes comments on the site. This is a longstanding policy.”
Cruz plans to send Google CEO Sundar Pichai a letter on Wednesday and called its alleged action part of a bigger problem involving the culture of free speech being attack in the U.S, adding that the company was helping to lead that charge.
Cruz wrote that Americans at one time understood the best response to free speech, “was more free speech.” He claimed that some Americans, with the assistance of powerful companies, are now pressing to silence and punish people who express their views that don’t “align with the prevailing and ever-shifting progressive orthodoxy.”
“These individuals demand that people with different views lose their livelihoods if they step out of line,” he wrote. “Companies like Google must — to use a most Orwellian term — ‘demonetize’ them.”
“As evidence by its actions yesterday, Google seems more than happy to play this censorship role by trying to break the financial back of a media publication it disagrees with,” he added.
The tech giant also clarified on Twitter that “The Federalist was never demonetized,” and added, “We worked with them to address issues on their site related to the comments section.”
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