As small businesses around the country struggle to cope with the economic fallout caused by strict, government-mandated lockdowns, America’s Big Tech companies are seeing a major boost in their businesses thanks to the demands of the pandemic.
Not only did Silicon Valley companies such as Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon see sales, earnings, and revenue jump in the previous quarter, even reaching a record high for Snapchat, but stock for Facebook skyrocketed to an all-time high this week shortly after “reporting a whopping 48% revenue growth year-over-year.”
Alphabet, Google’s parent company, also saw record profit in the first quarter of 2021 shortly after reports that Google’s YouTube made a higher revenue last quarter than “Snapchat, Linkedin and Pinterest combined.”
“A strong recovery in the advertising market and continued reliance on cloud services and at-home entertainment have given most tech firms a boost,” Axios reported.
The Big Tech boom follows months of censorship by Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube targeting political dissenters and former President Donald Trump. The tech giants also leveraged their power to censor discourse on COVID-19 and various related studies and treatments.
Big Tech companies also colluded with California Democrats to censor Americans posting about the 2020 election on social media. As early as 2019, Twitter, Facebook, and Google reportedly cooperated with state officials to meddle with users’ posts and offered a direct line of contact to their respective companies for censorship requests.
The Secretary of State also received “briefings” from communications firm SKDK, cautioning officials about certain social media posts and YouTube videos that they deemed unacceptable, while the Office of Election Cybersecurity, which is housed under the Secretary of State, also kept a database of posts “coded by threat level” that the state eventually requested be forcibly removed by Big Tech companies. Of the 31 requests for removal, Silicon Valley giants such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google-owned YouTube either nixed or flagged 24.
Source: The Federalist
