Murdoch accuses Google and Facebook of trying to ‘silence conservative voices’
Rupert Murdoch has accused tech giants of trying to “silence conservative voices” and “censorship”.
Speaking at News Corp’s annual shareholder meeting yesterday said “For many years, our company has been leading the global debate about big digital. What we have seen in the past few weeks about the practices at Facebook and Google surely reinforces the need for significant reform.”
“There is no doubt that Facebook employees try to silence conservative voices, and a quick Google News search on most contemporary topics often reveals a similar pattern of selectivity – or, to be blunt, censorship.”
News Corp has actively criticised Google and Facebook before, and its dominance of the digital marketing space.
He said: “Let us be very clear about the consequences of that digital ad market manipulation. Obviously, publishers have been materially damaged, but companies have also been overcharged for their advertising and consumers have thus paid too much for products.”
Google has previously denied similar claims, saying its algorithm is “applied universally to the corpus of news pages online and ranks them accordingly”.
Murdoch said it is crucial for conservatives to play an “active, forceful role” in public debates surrounding education, welfare and economic activity.
However, according to data from Facebook-owned analytics firm CrowdTangle, posts from conservative personalities such as Ben Shapiro routinely rank among the most popular on the platform.