During a Fox News segment that was flagged as potential misinformation by Twitter, Tucker Carlson said on Monday that big tech companies “rigged” the election by censoring opposing views
Shot: Carlson boldly claimed the electoral “system was rigged against one candidate and in favor of another, and not in ways that were hidden from view.”
In a fiery monologue, Carlson accused the media of colluding “with the Democratic nominees” and, in a reference to expanded mail-in ballot voting due to the coronavirus pandemic, said authorities “used our public health emergency for nakedly partisan ends.”
- On trust: “Other countries know this. They don’t use electronic voting because they know it undermines trust in democracy,” added Carlson, who endured backlash from conservatives last week for expressing skepticism about attorney Sidney Powell’s allegations of widespread voter fraud. “A system cannot work if no one trusts the vote, and that’s true here, too, as we’re finding out.”
- Big tech: The top-rated cable news host singled out technology firms for putting a thumb on the scales of the election, saying, “Above all, Democrats harnessed the power of Big Tech to win this election.”
- The Big 3: “Virtually all news and all information in the English-speaking world travels through a single company, Google. A huge percentage of our political debates take place on Facebook and Twitter,” he said.
- The battle of the mind: “If you use technology to censor the ideas that people are allowed to express online, ultimately, you control how the population votes.”
Carlson concluded by saying the election had been “rigged” and “nobody did anything about it.”
Chaser: President Donald Trump shared the segment to Twitter on Monday, which resulted in his tweet being labeled with a notice that read, “This claim about election fraud is disputed.”
- Such labels can reduce the number of people who see the offending tweets by nearly a third.
Trump has yet to concede: The president is continuing to challenge the reported results of the election, but has given the Government Services Administration the green light to begin the transition to Biden.
- Trump’s non-concession to Biden came as his legal team continues its campaign to overturn results in key states.
- In a pair of tweets, Trump expressed confidence that he “will prevail” but that “in the best interest of our Country” he had ordered the initial transition steps be taken.
