The Southern Poverty Law Center is a legal group that has watched its influence soar as the go-to consultant on “hate” for top tech firms, including Amazon, Spotify, Lyft and Google-owned YouTube, in the aftermath of the August, 2017 white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
“Those alliances have both astounded and alarmed conservatives who fear that the center’s hotly contested “hate map” is being wielded to deny platforms to mainstream right-of-center groups and viewpoints.
“Jim Campbell, senior attorney with the Alliance Defending Freedom, has already seen it happen. The conservative non-profit was floored after being removed last month from AmazonSmile’s list of charities over its status as an SPLC Designated Hate Group.”
“We rely on the Southern Poverty Law Center to determine which charities are in certain ineligible categories,” Amazon told the ADF. “You have been excluded from the AmazonSmile program because the Southern Poverty Law Center lists Alliance Defending Freedom in an ineligible category.”
“What frustrates conservatives is that tech companies are accepting such designations seemingly without question even though the SPLC has long been accused of juicing its prodigious fundraising through fear-mongering.”
“It’s important to know that the SPLC is not a neutral watchdog organization,” said Mr. Campbell. “It’s very clearly an openly partisan leftist group that puts a lot of people on the list that simply have good-faith disagreements with the way the SPLC sees policy situations.”
“Others are less diplomatic. Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson called the center a ‘thoroughly discredited left-wing group…’”
“Today the center smears people that don’t deserve to be smeared,” said Fox commentator John Stossel in a January video for Reason, adding, “It’s now a left-wing, money-grabbing slander machine.”
“None of that has hurt the center’s credibility with Silicon Valley, a relationship that took off after the ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, which left one dead. In a February report, the SPLC said “Charlottesville broke the dam,” finally convincing tech companies to heed the calls to make their platforms less hospitable to extremist groups.
“The post-Charlottesville moment has provided good examples of companies taking action where they’ve formerly been reluctant to do so, and they have been largely rewarded for it,” said the report. “They should go further.”
Critics fear that the tech industry has overcompensated by embracing the SPLC and its “hate map,” which has grown in the last year from 917 to 954 organizations ranging from the KKK to mainstream conservative outfits like the Family Research Council.
When the Media Research Center’s Brent Bozell unveiled Tuesday a coalition to fight threats to free speech, Conservatives Against Online Censorship, he specifically named the Southern Poverty Law Center. “Top social media firms, such as Google and YouTube, have chosen to work with dishonest groups that are actively opposed to the conservative movement, including the Southern Poverty Law Center,” said Mr. Bozell.
“Those companies need to make equal room for conservative groups as advisers to offset this bias,” he said. “That same attitude should be applied to employment diversity efforts. Tech companies need to embrace viewpoint diversity.”
Censorship of speech in this case, is not coming from a government body, but a coalition from private organizations who oppose conservative values. Will there come a time when conservative Christians who explain online the Bible teaching concerning LGBT lifestyles, false teachings of end-time organizations and churches, etc., will be marginalized on social media and other online platforms because they teach the Bible truth?
Remember, Protestant America, will eventually repudiate every principle of its constitution. See Testimonies for the Church, Vol. 5, page 451.