Resurfaced video shows Google CEOs plotting to increase censorship following 2016 Trump victory

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This is just an excerpt from The Ezra Levant Show. To see new, ad-free episodes, which air Monday - Friday @ 8 p.m. ET | 6 p.m. MT, become a subscriber to RebelNews+. This episode originally aired on August 30, 2024.

On Friday’s episode of The Ezra Levant Show, Ezra spoke with Allum Bokhari, managing director of the Foundation for Freedom Online about the history of Big Tech companies' engagement in censorship in order to suppress political opposition.

Allum showed Ezra a whistleblower video of Google executive's reactions to Donald Trump winning the U.S. presidential election in 2016. He obtained the leak in 2018, which shows a company-wide meltdown expressing horror at the republican victory and the role that social media and "low-information voters" had to play. He explained that this victory motivated Big Tech to heavily crack down on conservative speech leading up to the 2020 election.

Ezra predicted that censorship of right-wing views will have a much smaller effect on the 2024 election, considering more people are awake to the tricks used by Big Tech companies, and that X (formerly Twitter) is now a free speech platform after being purchased by Elon Musk. He asked Allum how he thinks the coming presidential election is going to go.

Allum responded:

I think Trump's chances are quite a bit better than they were in 2020. In 2020, you had this combination of so many things, you had the very peak of Silicon Valley censorship, and every single platform was controlled very, very tightly. Trump's most vocal supporters were banned. He himself was censored on many occasions during the election and lost his account on every major platform just after the election...
So they had all these advantages, which I don't think they'll have this time around. And also if you look at the polling, it's true.

Kamala Harris had a bit of a bump after she replaced Joe Biden simply because, you know, she's not senile, but if you look at the polling averages, Trump today is way better than where he was in 2020, even way better than where he was in 2016 at the same point in the race.

So polling-wise, it's actually looking quite good for Trump. I would say it's still a very tight race.