There were some really interesting stories of censorship by big technology on the weekend. First story is about famous Christian pastor and evangelist Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham. Facebook didn’t like what he shared, so they decided to ban him from their platform.

The Washington Times reports:

The Rev. Franklin Graham was kicked off Facebook for defending North Carolina’s “bathroom bill,” which the social-media giant’s review team decided was hate speech.

Facebook acknowledged over the weekend it had banned the prominent evangelist over transgender issues and called the 24-hour ban a mistake that it had already undone. But Mr. Graham was having none of it Sunday, calling the move “a personal attack towards me” and an example of the censorship that Silicon Valley has in store for Christians and/or conservatives.

A spokesman for Facebook told the Charlotte Observer on condition of anonymity that the review team had decided a 2016 post violated rules against “dehumanizing language” and exclusion of people based on, among other things, sexual orientation and gender self-identification. The post was deleted and Mr. Graham prevented from using the service for 24 hours.

I was thinking about this story when another news story popped up, this one about a transgender woman (a biological man) who screamed obscenities and treatened violence against a male store clerk and a female customer at a GameStop store.

Here’s the video: (WARNING: AWFUL VULGAR LANGUAGE)

And the story was reported by Daily Wire:

The video starts with the trans individual cussing out the male GameStop clerk after being offered store credit rather than a refund.

“I don’t want credit, you’re going to give me my f***ing money back,” the customer yells.

A woman not in the view of the camera took issue with the trans person’s vulgar language.

“Excuse me, sir, there’s a young man in here — you need to watch your mouth,” she says in a calm voice.

The trans person instantly becomes aggressive, screaming, “Excuse me — it is ma’am! It is ma’am!”

“I’m sorry. I can call the police if you’d like me to. You need to settle down,” the woman responds, keeping her calm tone.

“You need to settle down!” the enraged customer screams back at her, pointing at her face. “You need to settle down and mind your business!”

The trans person then turns to the clerk: “Ma’am! Once again: ma’am!”

“I said, ‘both of you,'” contends the young employee.

“No, you said, ‘sir’; once again, it’s ma’am!” the trans person screams in response, before threatening to fight him. “Mother f***er! Take it outside! You wanna call me ‘sir’ again? I will show you a f***ing sir!”

The aggressive customer then kicks downs products in the store and walks toward the exit door, but then turns back around.

[…]”I plan on telling the entire LGBTQ community,” he tells the employee. “You’re going to lose money over this.”

Indeed, anyone who disagrees with the LGBTQ community will lose money over it. And maybe even their means of earning money, too. That’s the way things are going these days, and the big technology companies certainly agree with punishing the wicked for their “hate speech”.

Meanwhile, over at YouTube, which is owned by Google, pro-life videos are being shadow-banned, because a pro-abortion journalist complained that she didn’t like seeing pro-life material in her search results.

The Daily Wire reports:

After a reporter from the leftist site Slate contacted YouTube, complaining that search results when using the term “abortion” featured a plethora of videos that were anti-abortion, including some from the pro-life group Live Action and others featuring staunch pro-life advocate Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro, suddenly the platform reputedly reflected a change with more videos featured that were pro-abortion or simply not pro-life.

On December 23, Shapiro’s various videos were found behind at least 40 others; videos from Live Action, whose videos have garnered over 140 million views, were far beyond the 150th video to be seen.

April Glaser, writing for Slate, trumpeted her part in effecting the apparent change at YouTube. She started by comparing the results of conducting a search for “abortion” on Google as opposed to YouTube:

When you Google “abortion,” the top results are relatively staid considering the divisiveness of the topic in American life. There’s a link to information about the procedure from Planned Parenthood, a Google map of nearby abortion providers, a link to an overview of anti-abortion and pro-choice arguments from the nonpartisan procon.org, and links to various news sources like the New York Times and the New Yorker.

Glaser writes that she emailed YouTube on December 14 complaining about the search results, and voila! She wrote on December 21, “By the end of this week, the top results (which are dynamic) included a news segment in Tamil, a video in which the director Penny Marshall (who died this week) ‘Opens Up on Drugs and Her Abortion,’ and a clip of an anti-abortion advocate responding to the abortion-legalization law passed in Ireland. Anti-abortion content meant to enrage or provoke viewers was no longer purely dominating the results, though they still looked very different from the generally more sober Google results.”

So, if you’re wondering how the big Silicon Valley / Seattle technology companies work, it’s simple. If you disagree with their far-left socially progressive agenda, then they either ban you outright, or they drop your content down in their search results.

Google’s censorship of Wintery Knight

In my own case, the number of Google search referrals from this blog has dropped 90% since Google lost the 2016 election to Trump. That’s when Google decided to get serious about censoring my content and dropping it in their search results. Once upon a time, Google would send me 1000 search referrals for every 1 sent by DuckDuckGo. But now, DuckDuckGo is sending me more search referrals than Google. If I search for keywords I’ve written about, my results are far, far back in Google’s search results. But on Duck Duck Go, my blog is usually in the top 10. My friends have verified this.

If you haven’t tried DuckDuckGo, please give it a try, and switch. They are now using Bing for maps, and Yelp for store reviews. The search results are more accurate than Google’s biased results.