“I promise you, one day you will say, first they came after conservatives, and I said nothing,” Dennis Prager said at a Senate hearing in July.
Dennis Prager runs Prager University – also known as PragerU – a nonprofit that publishes videos to YouTube and Facebook. Their videos “are presented by some of the finest minds in the world, including Pulitzer Prize winners, former prime ministers, scientists and professors from the most prestigious universities” according to Prager U
According to their website, PragerU says they have “millions of followers on Facebook and are the leading voice for conservative content online.”
Prager sued the platform in 2019 after YouTube – a Google subsidiary – categorized several of its videos in a way that hid them from some of the subscribers who had opted into “restricted mode,” which screens out content with mature themes. A federal appeals court in Seattle found YouTube is not a public forum subject to the First Amendment.
PragerU found an ally on this issue with Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D–Hawaii), who sued Google for violating her First Amendment rights after it temporarily suspended her campaign advertising after Gabbard took the limelight in the Democratic primary debate last June.
However, in a recent email blast, PragerU notified its subscribers that “Facebook just announced that they have identified PragerU as a fake news media outlet and they will, therefore, restrict and censor our reach to our own audience. Even people who have chosen to follow our page will be deliberately prevented from seeing our posts.”
This is not the first time these two companies have conflicted. A censorship scare from Facebook against PragerU occurred in 2018, which Facebook retracted after some pushback. It seems that will not be the case this time after Facebook has tightened their censoring parameters and the window for political correctness is increasingly shrinking.
“Every day,” PragerU contends, “we hold the mainstream media accountable for blatant misinformation and bias. However, Big Tech has been supporting a one sided politically motivated narrative and censoring alternative points of view.”
PragerU claims that “its voice is being silenced by Big Tech, conservative ideas are being censored, and freedom of speech is at risk. We must fight back by informing the public that Facebook is preventing people from learning the truth.”
Prager U started a petition for Facebook to stop the censorship
