GoogleThe New York Observer has a fascinating article on how the media, including high tech companies, are managing the 2016 presidential campaign.

Liz Crokin’s article of August 12 is a must-read. Excerpts follow, emphases mine.

Most of us know that The New York Times and The Washington Post are the most prominent newspapers in the tank for Hillary Clinton. We also know that many Americans refer to CNN as the Clinton News Network.

However, Crokin, an award-winning journalist and author, gives us solid evidence that Apple, Google, Twitter and others are manipulating what the public sees in a variety of ways.

Donald Trump supporters can easily fall foul of Apple, which sees a duty to warn people about the Republican nominee:

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.

Liz Crokin did some investigation, namely on iTunes, and found that none of the content, even when it related to terrorism or dictators, had such warnings. MAGAPod’s host, Mark Hammond, contacted Apple to point that out. An Apple representative promised to update his podcast to ‘clean’ within 24 hours.

Apple outright banned a video game about Hillary Clinton’s missing emails, ‘Capitol HillAwry’, until Breitbart published a story about it. It is now available.

Yet, Apple sees no need to warn online aficionados about anti-Trump content, however. A foul video game, Dump Trump, gets the go-ahead.

Apple also manipulates customers’ news feeds. As Crokin discovered, even selecting a conservative outlet as first choice does not mean that the other channels in the mix will be right-of-centre:

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.

Apple claim they have no skin in the political game, yet:

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.

There would be nothing wrong with that if Apple were not restricting what customers can see and play. However, they are playing an elitist, paternal role by censoring anything anti-Clinton — until customers complain.

Wikileaks’ Julian Assange found evidence that Clinton is using Google 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.

This means that if you key in search terms such as “Hillary Clinton criminal charges” into Google, you get results for “Hillary Clinton crime reform”.

Similar manipulations existed for Google searches on Donald Trump, comparing him to an historical figure. One such wheeze went as follows:

In July, searches for Trump’s book, Crippled America, returned images of Adolf Hitler’s manifesto Mein Kampf.

After these came to light, Google fixed them, but:

again, why do these issues always conveniently disparage Trump and help Clinton?

Twitter is also in the censorship game in favour of Democrats. Breitbart fans know that the site’s technical editor Milo Yiannopoulos has had his account banned for life.

However, what many people do not know is that Twitter banned black rapper Azealia Banks after she came out in support of Trump.

Such Twitter censorship is not new. This week, Buzzfeed found out that in 2015:

then-Twitter CEO Dick Costolo secretly ordered employees to filter out abusive and hateful replies to President Barack Obama.

No doubt a lot of people complained about their Obamacare premiums skyrocketing and their doctor’s retirement because of the programme. Not hateful, just truthful.

Now:

the platform also changed its algorithms to promote Clinton while giving negative exposure to Trump.

Furthermore, pro-Trump Twitter users find they are often unable to retweet comments favouring their candidate.

Instagram is also in the mix. They allow topless photos of Melania Trump but censored an Australian artist’s depiction of Hillary Clinton in a bikini.

Facebook allows far-left organisations and movements to maintain their pages while closing down pages promoting conservative ideas:

It should be noted that Facebook employees have donated more to Clinton than to any other candidate.

Crokin ended her article with a takedown of CNN coverage. Everyone I know in the US watches CNN. This is what they are seeing and hearing:

as NewsBusters pointed out for just one day, “CNN set aside nearly half of its air time on Wednesday’s New Day to various recent controversies involving the Trump campaign — 1 hour, 24 minutes, and 18 seconds over three hours.

Yet, when it came to the secret $400m airlift to Iran:

John Berman gave a 27-second news brief to the report, but didn’t mention that the payment was sent on “an unmarked cargo plane.” New Day, therefore, devoted over 187 times more coverage to Trump than to the millions to Iran.

Crokin notes that when CNN have two Republicans and two Democrats on a panel, one of the Republicans is always anti-Trump.

Then, there’s their news site:

Right now, CNN has a story on its site called “Which Republicans oppose Trump and why?” There’s no corresponding story about Democrats who oppose Clinton, even though her underdog challenger in the primary lasted far longer and received far more votes than any of Trump’s Republican challengers.

Crokin rightly concludes:

These companies are engaging in activity that can quickly lead down a very dangerous slippery slope and this should concern all freedom-loving Americans—not just conservatives.

It should be noted that the publisher of the Observer is Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. Every Trump-related article or op-ed piece has a disclaimer.

I plan to feature more US censorship articles in the next few weeks.