Study: 144 Million Instances of Big Tech Censorship – in Just 3 Months

The Media Research Center has published the results of a study on secondhand censorship — those who are affected by censorship by being denied access to the content they were seeking out. The study found 144 million times that users have been affected by censorship of conservative figures alone — and that astonishing number occurred in just the first three months of 2022.

The MRC defines secondhand censorship as “the number of times that users on social media had information kept from them.” Defined this way, every follower of a censored account is affected by censorship.

Via the Media Research Center:

MRC Free Speech America tracked the effects of secondhand censorship using our one-of-a-kind CensorTrack database. Across seven Big Tech platforms – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn and Spotify – MRC Free Speech America logged a grand total of 144,301,713 times that users on social media had information kept from them in the first quarter of 2022 alone.

MRC calculated the secondhand censorship effect by adding the number of followers each account had at the time of each censorship case recorded during the quarter.

The secondhand censorship effect for the first quarter of 2022 includes only the censorship cases we found or were informed about. Because of this, it represents a mere fraction of the total scale of secondhand censorship taking place.

The report also states that “Big Tech’s lack of transparency means that an incalculable amount of censorship – beyond what is shown in this report – takes place every day.”

Examples cited by the MRC include the secondhand censorship of Donald Trump’s 90 million Twitter followers. Including the fact that Trump tweeted an average of 18 times a day, this amounts to an estimated 1,620,000,000 instances of secondhand censorship per day.

Another example cited is Spotify’s removal of 70 episodes of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. Given that Rogan averages roughly 11 million listeners per episode, this amounts to 770 million instances of secondhand censorship.

Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.