Rachel Bovard on Big Tech: ‘President Trump Is Being Censored’

A reelected President Donald Trump could take a more aggressive approach on Big Tech, which has been weaponized by the president’s political opponents to censor speech they disagree with, according to Rachel Bovard, Senior Director of Policy at the Conservative Partnership Institute.

“I think this is a huge opportunity for President Trump if he gets a second term,” Bovard said during an interview with The Epoch Times’ American Thought Leaders, noting that Trump’s first term was “effectively squandered” by a congress pushing an impeachment agenda based on “fake conspiracy theory.”

“In a second term from President Trump, he will feel he does have a mandate to come in, and really aggress on the issues that got him elected in 2016,” Bovard told host Jan Jekielek. “You’re going to see a second term President Trump take on big tech, in a way that he’s threatened in the first term, but hasn’t really carried out. He’s going to do as much as he can to start reining in those tech giants.”

When asked about Twitter hiding Trump’s post ahead of Election Day, Bovard, who is a senior adviser at conservative policy group Internet Accountability Project, said it was a cat-out-of-the-bag moment showing how the company is “politically motivated in one direction.”

“It’s interesting because Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was sitting before the Senate a week ago, telling senators with a completely straight face that Twitter has no ability to impact the election outcome. Yet they’ve spent the last 24 hours moderating content for election integrity solely in one direction,” said Bovard. “So if Twitter can’t impact election outcomes, I’m not sure why Twitter is censoring the president for misinformation.”

Bovard said the difference between Democrats and Republicans, when it comes to speech they don’t like, is Republicans try to counter speech they disagree with with more speech, while Democrats want social media platforms to censor it, she said. For example, NBC News in June pushed Google to demonetize The Federalist, a conservative political news site.

“The mainstream media is working very hard and with success to weaponize these big tech platforms against speech they disagree with,” she said. “It’s a very, very concerning and troubling trend, when sort of woke corporate media combines with woke corporate power to stifle out legitimate political speech. That cannot stand in a free society.”

“President Trump is being censored. A lot of conservative accounts are being censored for simply raising questions,” she said. “This is what these platforms say they’re designed to do, which is to foster free thought, free inquiry, and to allow people to make up their own minds. The way they act is very much in contradiction to that. Again, Congress should have acted on this in the last four years and they have not. So this is where we find ourselves.”

Correction: This article has been updated with Rachel Bovard’s correct organizational affiliation.