On Friday, August 9, 2019, Peter Thiel told “Fox & Friends” that conservatives have every right to be concerned about social media bias against Republicans.
This was in response to the temporary banning of Senator Mitch McConnell’s campaign account @Team_Mitch. After considerable pressure on social media, this account was restored that same Friday.
Nevertheless, Thiel still offered his two cents on the matter.
“There’s an outside story of what happens on Twitter to the outside world,” Thiel stated.
He added that these social media companies have semi-totalitarian practices.
And then there’s an inside story inside these companies where they are sort of totalitarian, semi-totalitarian one-party states. It’s like North Korea.
In Thiel’s view, Silicon Valley is not about diversity or cosmopolitanism. Instead, he believes the culture it promotes is insular. He told “Fox & Friends” that “Silicon Valley likes to think of itself as sort of cosmopolitan or globalist, but I think that’s not actually what’s going on here. It is just sort of an insular form of parochialism. Maybe it’s borderline autistic, so it’s a complete incuriosity about the rest of the world.”
The contrarian investor also contends that Silicon Valley has become detached from reality.
So I think if you ask people at Google, they wouldn’t even think in terms of patriotic, unpatriotic. They don’t think of China as a geopolitical rival. They’re just not really aware of what’s going on outside of their campus.
According to Thiel, Silicon Valley’s decision to work with China instead of the U.S. seems rather strange, especially when looking back at how companies behaved throughout the Cold War.
If you look at the entire Cold War history — the last, you know, century — I don’t think there’s ever a case where a major US company refused to work with the US and worked with our major geopolitical rivals. It’s not like this weird, liberal thing. It is absolutely unprecedented.
With how rampant social media censorship of conservatives has become, Thiel views conservative complaints about social media bias against them as valid concerns.
“You always have the question – are these things innocent accidents or are they intentional acts of political sabotage? And the Republicans, I think, are right to be somewhat suspicious because this stuff keeps happening and Silicon Valley is something of a one-party state,” he said.
Thiel sees political correctness as the main culprit behind this recent wave of tech censorship.
It would be one thing if everybody in Silicon Valley was anti-Trump … the majority are, but, of course, most people who are Republican, conservative are uncomfortable saying that. That’s the real problem. It’s the sort of political correctness where you can’t speak out.
For years, Thiel has been one of the most thought-provoking investors in the world. From supporting Ron Paul in the past to championing President Trump’s America First agenda, Thiel is not afraid to ruffle the political establishment’s feathers.
As someone who built his name in Silicon Valley, Thiel understands the true nature of the beast that many right-wingers are confronting on Twitter and other social media platforms. Thiel will play an indispensable in making sure that the Internet remains free from political meddling.
