Social media have been on the hot seat lately, but the left-biased press has mostly focused on privacy issues.  The more significant issue is capricious censorship, which has hit conservatives especially hard.

For a while there, I had thought there was not much problem, and the people yelling censorship were probably nuts of some kind.  But my view changed when Bridget Johnson, the pleasant, thoughtful, and intelligent writer on Pajamas Media, was banned without explanation from Twitter, and then Diamond and Silk, two funny and popular black pro-Trump vloggers, were declared by Facebook to "unsafe for the community."

Unsafe?  Two black women who like President Trump?  Yes, unsafe, all right, but only to Democratic electoral prospects.

Yeah.  There's censorship.  It hasn't gotten the attention it should get, and congressional hearings don't seem to be going anywhere at this point.

That's why I was heartened to see that Brent Bozell, of the Media Research Center, organized a petition with 60 prominent conservatives signing on, urging Facebook and others to get serious about the shenanigans going on in their left-wing zero-political-diversity companies.  It was amusing to see, since typically, only lefties do petitions of this kind.  Since a left-wing group of companies is being petitioned, and this is a form of protest lefties understand, maybe these companies will respond.

The petition contains four useful suggestions around transparency of policies that might just end the caprice and enable these companies to handle their content professionally instead of ideologically.  Check them out here.

I would add one more suggestion, and that is that these companies hire outside their political comfort zone so that a diversity of ideas can be heard in the companies.  These companies are so riddled with leftists of the activist stripe, educated by the nutty professors of the left, that they might not even know they are acting like Soviet commissars.  They just don't know any conservatives and have never met any, and thus, they assume that conservatives are wicked monsters instead of fellow citizens and voters.

Facebook does seem to have some degree of seriousness about the problem in that it has hired former congressman John Kyl, a conservative, to look into the issue.  So far, so good, but of course, the proof will be in whether he gets to the bottom of the issue and they respond to his recommendations.  It looks as though it could be a good start, and in return, Facebook will avoid getting itself regulated as an edited publication responsible for every last word of content that makes it to its platform.

Because if Facebook or one of the others – Google, YouTube, Twitter, etc. – wants to go around censoring, fine, that's its right as a public company.  But they can no longer call themselves impartial platforms if that is their choice; they will have to be called edited publications.  As edited publications, they will need to be held responsible for everything, every last thing, every post by a pervert, every post by a terrorist, every post by a spray shooter, and every post by a serial killer who posts on their sites.  They will need to be sue-able as newspapers are if anything goes wrong, instead of exempt as neutral platforms as they are now.  All because they choose to edit who can post what.  Up to them.

The organizing from Bozell's corner sets the stage for change and is a welcome sign that conservatives aren't gonna sit there and take this.  They are taking action.  Let's hope it keeps the pressure on.