Gee, remember the heady days of top-down censorship six years ago? Big Tech decided to shut down any dissent from the COVID narratives approved by Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins. Platforms punished users who dared to question the "science" of masking, school closures, the precise calculation of six-foot distancing, and any suggestion that COVID-19 resulted from manipulation of coronaviruses in a Wuhan lab rather than a natural jump in a "wet market." That worked so well that the Biden Regency attempted to make it permanent in 2021 with its "misinformation" board.

Thankfully, the nation put those days behind us. Or did we? Media Research Center took a hard look at how Big Tech platforms handled Graham Platner's scandals and lies, and it found .... nothing:

Two of the most popular news-aggregating services systematically suppressed scores of articles about disgraced former Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner for months during his ill-fated campaign, until the weight of his scandals finally became too much to ignore, a shocking new study has found.

Media Research Center (MRC) revealed that both Apple News and Google News published exactly zero stories between last November and May covering controversies, including Platner’s Nazi tattoo and his offensive Reddit posts.

The study also found that the tech giants failed to promote “at least 112” news stories published by conservative-leaning outlets that investigated Platner’s disturbing history during that November-May period.

MRC does not believe in coincidences any more than I do. In fact, MRC's president uses a very familiar term to describe their intervention on Der Oysterführer's behalf:

MRC President David Bozell went so far as to accuse the tech platforms of running a “protection racket” for Platner by memory-holing unflattering coverage as it slowly became obvious the left had erred in holding him up as a blue-collar “everyman” in his campaign to unseat Sen. Susan Collins.

Hmmmm. Maybe we can call them the Protection Racket Media. Catchy name! I wonder who may have been using it for a while now. Great minds think alike, and all that ...

According to the MRC study, the blackout dates make a very good case for deliberate obstruction. It began in October, when polling showed that Platner had the best chance of beating Susan Collins. At that point, both platforms stopped including any negative reporting on Platner, despite ongoing debate over his social-media posts in which he suggested that women were partly responsible for being raped, that he had become a "communist," and attacking another veteran over his disability. Only when the New York Times reported at the end of May that Herr Totenkopf had been sexting multiple women while married did Google and Apple begin featuring any negative coverage of the Kik creeper. 

It's not as though the platforms lacked for material, either:

MRC found that the digital news aggregators effectively shielded tens of millions of users from negative coverage of Platner. From Nov. 1 through May 30 (when The New York Times published its story about sexting allegations against Platner), neither Apple News nor Google News featured a single story about Platner in their heavily trafficked top 20 morning news feeds except for one story promoted by Google News on April 7 touting an Axios piece on Platner’s confidence that he would defeat Mills in the Maine primary.

During the same period, Platner was already being dogged by mounting controversies, including that he had a Nazi-tied tattoo and the resurfacing of disturbing Reddit posts. 

As early as October, Platner's scandalous Totenkopf tattoo was revealed, along with his social media posts in which he tried to excuse sexual abuse. He also made racist comments about black Americans, smeared rural Mainers, disparaged “all” cops as bastards and used sexist slurs. ...

Apple News and Google News had no shortage of shocking stories about Platner to choose from. MRC identified no less than 112 stories from right-leaning outlets, and additional publications from left-leaning and center outlets, like The New York Times, HuffPost, and The Wall Street Journal, that covered the scandals dogging Platner. Yet as polls showed Platner comfortably beating Collins, the news aggregators chose to conceal the negative stories about him, depriving voters of vital news and information.

The right-leaning stories that were sidelined by Apple and Google came from some of the most visited news sources in America, including Fox News, Daily Mail, New York Post, Breitbart, Newsmax, The Federalist, The Washington Times and Washington Examiner.

The Free Beacon in particular delivered hard reporting on Platner's scandals, and plenty of commentary resulted from it. Those stories were impossible for media to miss, unless they intended to bury any negative coverage of the likely Democrat nominee. Fox News also did significant coverage of Der Oysterführer, as MRC lays out at Newsbusters from its report. The Townhall group did both reporting and commentary for months on Platner, all while Apple and Google hid Platner's flaws from their consumers until almost the moment Platner imploded. 

Who's running the aggregators at Google and Apple these days? Fauci? Collins? Nina Jankowicz? 

In the end, Platner imploded despite Protection Racket Media "coverage," not because of it. It failed because too many independent media platforms exist for censorship to succeed, and that will remain the case as long as those platforms get the support they need. That includes X/Twitter, too, which allowed our independent coverage to gain traction. Elon Musk's buyout of Twitter not only preserved free speech on tech platforms, it helped expose the censorship regime with which Big Tech cooperated and boosted until that point. 

It hasn't ended. We still get inquiries from "fact checkers" and "ratings" groups that serve the Protection Racket Media censorship complex. We will not play their games, nor will we cooperate with "coverage" limitations. We still have a lot of work to do to beat the Big Tech gatekeepers, and we will not rest until we do. 

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