Who really resisted Big Tech? Hint: Not Parler



In the aftermath of the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, America’s digital battlegrounds were scorched by censorship — not just from Big Tech, but from within.

On Jan. 9, Apple banned Parler from its App Store. Google Play followed the same day. Three days later, Wimkin — another fast-growing platform I founded in 2020 — was pulled from both stores while trending as the No. 1 download.

This story isn’t just about app stores or privacy. It’s about who actually fights for liberty — and who cashes in on the illusion of it.

Apple reinstated Parler just two weeks later. Big Tech doesn’t reinstate fighters. It rewards compliance. Parler capitulated, big-time.

Parler’s infrastructure wasn’t just negligent; it became a surveillance tool. The platform required government ID to create an account and failed to scrub GPS metadata from user-uploaded media. That metadata was easily scraped and used to locate users inside and around the Capitol on Jan. 6.

IDs plus GPS equals turnkey doxxing. Parler didn’t resist the feds — it did their job for them.

Wimkin held the line

Wimkin, by contrast, required no ID and stripped metadata to protect user anonymity. But even though we did everything right, Apple and Google deplatformed us at the height of our momentum.

At the same time, the U.S. Postal Service’s secret surveillance unit — iCOP — began monitoring Wimkin for “threats.” The message was clear: The surveillance state had our platform in its crosshairs.

Then came two separate demands from Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) and the January 6 committee, ordering Wimkin to turn over internal communications. Wimkin refused.

Wimkin, in fact, was one of the few companies to hold the line. That is what fighting looks like.

And where were the conservative influencers? The so-called "free-speech warriors" refused to promote Wimkin unless they were paid $5,000 or more per post. They’d praise Parler — which helped get users arrested — but wouldn’t lift a finger for the one platform actually resisting federal pressure.

RELATED: We say we want free speech — until we hear something we hate

Photo by Malte Mueller via Getty Images

Resistance is not futile

Wimkin wasn’t unprofitable — we were demonetized, targeted, and shut down at every turn. We burned through legal fees to protect users and stand up to Congress. And we received practically no media defense, no major promotion, and no institutional support.

But we stood our ground. And now, Wimkin is going public on the NASDAQ.

This story isn’t just about app stores or privacy. It’s about who actually fights for liberty — and who cashes in on the illusion of it.

Parler bent the knee. Wimkin planted a flag.

Big Tech’s charm campaign flops as Trump’s DOJ brings the heat



Between soaring stock prices and a relatively new presidential administration stretched thin while putting out global fires, you might think Big Tech tyrants are enjoying a free pass. Has their censorship and collusion been quietly forgotten?

Perhaps not.

While consumers have clearly benefited from many Big Tech companies’ baseline goods and services, it’s evident that the companies have resorted to extralegal and unsavory measures to maintain and grow their market share.

Without the slightest fear of consequences, Silicon Valley monopolists spent years targeting dissenting voices — not just conservatives, but nearly anyone slightly out of tune with the far left. Those who refused to play along found social media accounts restricted — or even banned outright — while search engine algorithms buried websites so far down the results list that few would ever find them. This sinister practice became known as “shadow-banning.”

Ultimately, their plan to manipulate voting outcomes backfired. Despite their best efforts, Republicans swept 2024’s elections, and tech executives have conveniently made a late shift toward the GOP. Though their smiles flashed during President Trump’s inauguration were spun as a mark of a genuine change of sentiment, their real intentions were obvious: to cozy up to the new guys in power.

Luckily, despite seemingly chummy behavior, the Trump White House is going after Silicon Valley.

The Trump administration fights back

In late July, the Justice Department filed a landmark statement of interest in a case accusing mainstream media outlets of illegally colluding with social media giants to deplatform conservatives. Just two weeks before, a federal judge rejected Apple’s attempt to dismiss the Justice Department’s lawsuit against the company.

These are the latest examples of the tide turning against Big Tech. While the leaders have tried to cozy up to the Trump administration, their pleas have already fallen on deaf ears and will continue to do so.

While some are surprised by Trump’s efforts to rein in Big Tech, these moves are consistent with his philosophy.

In his first term, his Justice Department joined with 15 mostly Republican-leaning states to file an antitrust suit against Google.

Moreover, Vice President JD Vance historically has been a critic of Big Tech, even expressing support for the work of Lina Khan, President Biden’s Federal Trade Commission chair, who aggressively went after the largest offenders. Last year, Vance described Khan as “one of the few people in the Biden administration that I think is doing a pretty good job.”

Personnel is policy, and thus it’s telling that one of Vance’s former staffers, Gail Slater, now heads the Justice Department’s antitrust division.

Slater, speaking about the suit against Google earlier this year, said, “In a time of political division in our nation, the case against Google brings everyone together.

"Nothing less than the future of the internet is at stake.”

No Big Tech sympathy there.

Biden’s anti-capitalist approach

However, Biden's and Trump’s approaches to antitrust issues have notable differences. Biden’s brigades wanted to either punish or scapegoat companies for reasons rooted in far-left economics.

In announcing the suit filed against Apple in March 2024, the Justice Department said the company’s net income “exceeds any other company in the Fortune 500 and the gross domestic products of more than 100 countries.”

Similarly, in announcing a case against Visa last year, the department cited the company’s operating income, operating margins, and network fees.

The implication is that the companies’ outsized earnings were evidence of their guilt.

The suit filed against Visa was particularly egregious. The company’s market share is only 60%, with no evidence of anti-competitive activity, and a raft of upstart competitors could lead that market share to decline.

Breitbart News reported that the suit was politically motivated (to scapegoat for Bidenflation). Biden administration officials hoped that the Southern District of New York would overlook the weak claims within the suit and proceed.

Trump’s pro-capitalist accountability

By contrast, Trump administration officials are looking to strengthen capitalism, not tear it down. “Big” should always merit skepticism, but Trump’s antitrust team knows it doesn’t always have to be bad. In the absence of unfair company practices, administration officials don’t want to interfere. They believe upholding law and order is the basis of antitrust law.

The tide is turning against Big Tech.

Thus, when a federal judge ruled in April that Google had violated antitrust law, Attorney General Pam Bondi said the Justice Department would focus on “encroachments on free speech and free markets by tech companies.”

Apple and others certainly have plenty of evidence of that!

Honesty and transparency are fundamental to free markets. But both Google and Meta have admitted to failing on both counts. In May, Google agreed to pay a fine of $1.4 billion to Texas in response to two lawsuits that accused the company of privacy violations related to tracking users’ locations and searches.

Last year, Meta also paid $1.4 billion to Texas, following allegations that it had used facial recognition software without getting users’ permission to do so.

Honesty also means not rigging the rules in your favor. But that’s exactly what Google has been charged with in several antitrust cases. The company has lost three of these cases involving its app store, search engine, and advertising technology.

In some jurisdictions, it’s three strikes before you’re out. No wonder the Trump administration didn’t amend the Biden Justice Department’s call for Google to be broken up. Given how the tech giant now operates units ranging from YouTube to a self-driving taxi company, some say the company should break itself up.

RELATED: Congress has the power to crush Big Tech’s app monopoly

Photo by Bloomberg/Getty Images

Moreover, Apple’s brazen tactics have stood out among its Big Tech brethren. Earlier this year, a federal judge ruled that the company had “willfully” failed to comply with an earlier court order related to its app store. In trying to cover its tracks, the judge said Apple engaged in a “cover-up,” which included one employee lying under oath.

Justice for Americans

While consumers have clearly benefited from many Big Tech companies’ baseline goods and services, it’s evident the companies have resorted to extralegal and unsavory measures to try to maintain and grow their market share.

Their losses in the courts and their lack of support in the Trump administration are bad news for them, but great news for the American people.

Inside the pandemic industrial complex: Censorship, coercion, and collusion



Matt Kibbe has remained relentless in his pursuit of the truth about the COVID-19 pandemic. From secretive gain-of-function research to oppressive lockdown policies and aggressive government censorship, Kibbe is diving deep into one of the greatest scandals in our nation’s history — a scandal too many have overlooked.

But the American people deserve clarity on the origins of the virus and why our government responded with lockdowns, coercion, and censorship. Kibbe’s docuseries “The Coverup,” on BlazeTV+, aims to address our long list of unanswered questions.

Episode five — “Muckraker” — drops today. This latest installment follows Kibbe as he teams up with Twitter Files journalist Matt Taibi to discuss how Fauci, Birx, and key health agencies colluded with Big Tech to hide the truth from the public.

“Muckraker” is a plunge into the pandemic industrial complex — an insidious network of health bureaucracies, including the CDC, NIH, FDA, WHO, and several NGOs — that colluded with Big Tech companies to ensure that the COVID-19 narrative, from vaccines to the lab-leak theory and everything in between, was what the government wanted it to be.

In a flagrant violation of the First Amendment, intense pressure coming from both law enforcement and health agencies was directed toward social media companies, which compliantly censored Americans daring to question, theorize, or criticize outside the bounds of what the government deemed appropriate.

This censorship took many different forms. Shadow-banning, for example, was the covert practice used by tech companies to restrict a user's content visibility or reach on a platform without the user's knowledge, often through algorithmic suppression or reduced engagement. Health bureaucracies created and pushed frameworks for content moderation, which social media platforms then adopted. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg confessed that Biden administration officials were brutal in their demands to kill certain ideas in the public square.

Often the content that demanded moderation was information that the government, including health agencies, knew was true — like adverse vaccine side effects — but it was squashed nonetheless if it opposed the approved narrative.

“They were trying to re-engineer how people thought,” Taibbi says.

But thought control wasn’t their only aim. The simultaneous rise in censorship and bioterrorism research is no coincidence.

Tune in to “The CoverUp” episode 5, as Kibbe and Taibbi unravel the pandemic industrial complex, exposing how federal health agencies and Big Tech prolonged lockdowns, fueled fear, and hid the government’s role in the creation of the virus.

To watch episode 5 of “The Coverup” or binge the whole series, go to FauciCoverup.com. Use the code ORWELL to get $20 off your first year of BlazeTV+.

Big Tech rigged the algorithm. Then they weaponized it.



The algorithm is its own “Animal Farm.” “Four legs good, two legs bad” may come in the form of binary code, but the tyranny is just as real. Most content in alternative media gets watered down to please the ruling digital overlords.

Unless you work for a company like Blaze Media — which has built talent lineups that can thrive outside the algorithm — odds are, you were made to be ruled.

Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Trans — they’ve all come for you once. They’ll do it again.

Ever wonder why some “conservative” hosts sound bold on a handful of safe topics but go quiet on election interference or the COVID jab? The algorithm spoke. They complied.

Pound for pound, my show may have taken the biggest hit among conservatives trying to monetize YouTube traffic since 2020. That we managed to hit seven-figure revenues without help from the world’s largest search engine is, frankly, a miracle.

Big Tech operates like a loaded gun, aimed and cocked by the federal government.

The Biden administration didn’t just whisper suggestions. It literally contacted YouTube and demanded the censorship of Alex Berenson. That’s bad enough.

But thanks to research by DataRepublican and DOGE, we now know the algorithm went a step further — using your tax dollars to boost regime-approved content across major tech platforms through USAID.

That’s not just outrageous. It’s an antitrust violation, plain and simple. And I don’t plan on taking it lying down.

For several months, I’ve worked with First Liberty in Dallas — one of the nation’s top constitutional conservative legal organizations. With their help, I filed a formal complaint with the Federal Trade Commission just before Memorial Day. Here’s a key excerpt:

YouTube’s metrics show that the "Steve Deace Show" experienced explosive growth on YouTube in 2020. The show continued strong in 2021, but toward the end of that year, his videos started being removed. And this precipitated a sharp fall in views and impressions in 2022. The sharp decline strongly suggests that YouTube shadow banned or otherwise limited the visibility of the "Steve Deace Show" in 2022 and possibly starting in the end of 2021. During the same period of time where YouTube views and impressions were sharply declining, the "Steve Deace Show" experienced significant growth on other platforms. The show's strong performance on Apple Podcasts maintained their upper trajectory throughout this period of time.

Consider the contrast: While YouTube buried the show in 2021, my podcast was outperforming on Apple — strong enough to earn me a three-year contract extension with Blaze Media. That same year, my book “Faucian Bargain” became a No. 1 bestseller in the United States.

It doesn’t add up — unless you account for censorship.

In 2021, 69% of our YouTube views came from subscribers, 31% from nonsubscribers. In 2022, that number skewed even further — 76% subscribers, only 24% nonsubscribers. That ratio should never tilt that far. Most YouTube traffic typically comes from recommendations, not regular followers.

RELATED: Congress has the power to crush Big Tech’s app monopoly

Photo Illustration by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images

As we explained in our FTC complaint: “This trend line is clear evidence of suppression because it shows how YouTube refused to feature, refused to recommend, and otherwise decreased the visibility of the platform.”

Word is, FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson takes Big Tech censorship seriously. I hope that’s true — because people likely died due to what YouTube did. Shows like mine were offering counternarratives to the COVID cult. And we were silenced.

Whoever controls language controls the debate. That’s why this isn’t just a tech policy fight. It’s a battle for the future of Western civilization.

The left has shown its hand: If they had the power, they’d disappear you. They already tried. Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Trans — they’ve all come for you once. They’ll do it again.

This isn’t a squabble over ad revenue or traffic metrics. It’s a battle against the deliberate unraveling of reality itself.

So fight we must. And with severe prejudice.

Stay tuned.

Steve Deace vs. Big Tech censorship — the battle everyone should be following



One of the keys to success in digital content creation is mastering search engine optimization — a powerful strategy that boosts a creator’s visibility. SEO involves using targeted keywords in video titles, descriptions, and tags, along with engaging thumbnails and captions, to help search engines like Google and YouTube rank content higher in search results, driving more viewers to discover it.

Here’s how it works: A YouTuber films a cooking video demonstrating a pasta recipe. To reach a wider audience, she applies SEO by crafting a keyword-rich title and description with phrases like “easy dinner ideas” and “quick pasta dish” and adding relevant tags to her video. If she does this well, she increases her video’s chances of ranking higher in YouTube search results, attracting more viewers in a competitive digital landscape.

But what happens when Big Tech shadow cabals in collaboration with federal entities decide to erect virtual barriers that prevent certain topics from appearing on search result pages — regardless of how adeptly the creator used SEO and other content-optimizing digital tools?

BlazeTV host Steve Deace has been living out the reality of that question for years.

Topics — especially “controversial” ones — YouTube, Apple iTunes, and Google have deemed problematic are quietly buried under an avalanche of other content. This censorship has been happening for years, so conservative content creators got smarter and found loopholes around the algorithms by avoiding key words and phrases they knew would be flagged and squashed.

However, Big Tech companies are now “transcribing everything that's said on podcasts,” meaning creators cannot avoid the consequences of discussing forbidden topics.

“So let's pretend we spend an entire entire show just debunking the demonic ideology of transgenderism, but we market it in a way that it says nothing about trans in order to try to get around the algorithm. Well, now that they're transcribing that for us, we can't get around that,” says producer Aaron McIntire.

Creators can appeal YouTube’s decision to demonetize their show, but success is rare. “There's basically no recourse whatsoever,” says Aaron.

“I would venture a guess we are the largest show in America with by far the most anemic YouTube traffic,” says Steve. “They're making it so we can't connect with our audiences, and if we can't connect with you, we can't hit the numbers we want to get the monetization we need to keep even doing this at all.”

Steve has been battling Big Tech censorship behind the scenes for years now. Recently, however, his fight experienced a new development when he contacted First Liberty — “the leading constitutional conservative political advocacy organization in the country” — which determined that Steve, indeed, had grounds to file a formal complaint with the Federal Trade Commission.

To hear where Steve is at in the process of fighting Big Tech censorship, watch the episode above.

Want more from Steve Deace?

To enjoy more of Steve's take on national politics, Christian worldview, and principled conservatism with a snarky twist, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

Congress has the power to crush Big Tech’s app monopoly



Global policymakers and consumers are weary of Big Tech monopolies. While excessive consolidation of power leads to privacy violations, price gouging, and stifling innovation, it poses a unique threat to free speech.

Trump administration antitrust enforcers understood that threat. As Assistant Attorney General Gail Slater observed, when a handful of companies control the flow of information, “someone can be disappeared from the internet quite easily.”

Digital free speech shouldn’t depend on the shifting preferences of Apple executives or Google policy teams.

Conservatives increasingly see Big Tech’s ability to distort and manipulate public discourse as a downstream effect of its market dominance. In the case of the mobile internet, it takes only two companies — Apple and Google — to control the smartphone experience of nearly every American.

Congress is beginning to respond. Two recently introduced bills would take on Apple and Google’s app store choke points directly. The Open App Markets Act, co-sponsored by Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), and the App Store Freedom Act, sponsored by Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Fla.), aim to empower users by giving them the option to download apps from sources outside of Apple and Google’s proprietary platforms, including alternative marketplaces.

Why do these technical details matter for speech? Because Apple and Google’s gatekeeper power has already been abused to silence dissent.

In 2021, Parler — a social media app popular on the right — was removed from Apple and Google’s app stores for allegedly having “inadequate” content moderation policies. The timing followed reports that the platform was used to coordinate the January 6 Capitol riot. Virtually overnight, Parler went from one of the fastest growing apps in the world to a ghost town. Internet consumers move quickly, and the app’s months in Big Tech’s doghouse became a death sentence. Parler never recovered.

Parler wasn’t an isolated case. Years earlier, Google banned Gab, another free speech-oriented platform, while Apple never allowed it to launch in the first place. Google also initially refused to approve President Trump’s Truth Social due to concerns over its moderation policies. And abroad, Apple has bowed to authoritarian regimes — removing apps used by dissidents in China and Russia at the request of those governments.

RELATED: Upgrade to a dumbphone

http://www.fotogestoeber.de via iStock/Getty Images

The problem runs deeper than censorship. Apple and Google have used their dominance to dictate the design and speech choices of developers. App makers are often forbidden from communicating key information to users — such as the availability of cheaper subscription pricing outside of Apple and Google’s walled gardens.

The scope of their power is staggering. Roughly 91% of Americans own a smartphone. More than 99% of those devices run on Apple’s iOS or Google’s Android operating systems. And 88% of the time spent on those phones is inside apps — not on web browsers.

Without real guardrails, that bottleneck becomes a single point of failure. It’s a choke point ready to be exploited by governments, activist groups, or corporations that want to control speech.

Some openly defend the current system precisely because it allows Apple and Google to keep disfavored apps off the market. Even before Elon Musk acquired Twitter (now X), Apple and Google pressured the company to increase moderation. After Musk’s takeover, activist organizations lobbied Apple and Google to ban X altogether if Musk didn’t reinstate stricter content rules.

An open app ecosystem benefits everyone. Conservatives celebrating Big Tech’s apparent political shifts should remember how easily those loyalties change. Liberals worried about “tech bro” influence should support guardrails that limit partisan manipulation — regardless of who holds power.

Digital free speech shouldn’t depend on the shifting preferences of Apple executives or Google policy teams. Congress must act to restore balance and ensure pluralism. The Open App Markets Act and the App Store Freedom Act offer real, durable solutions. They deserve bipartisan support.

Censorship Is Democrats’ Only Means Of Political Survival

Obama's embrace of censorship speaks to the desperation of a party that can't survive without uniform control of the information space.

David French And The Never-Trump Faction Don’t Care About Free Speech At All

If you think America is just an idea, then you’ll gladly sacrifice the rights of Americans for the ‘rights’ of foreigners.

Propaganda Press Upset Trump Could Shut Down CISA’s Election Censorship

The Trump administration has launched a review of every Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) role related to election security and so-called mis- and disinformation after CISA began censoring speech. CISA, originally established in 2018 to address cybersecurity threats, quickly transformed into a government-run censorship operation, particularly during the 2020 election. In response, the propaganda press […]

Exclusive: Republicans huddle with FCC chair in closed-door meeting to dismantle DEI, liberal media machine



House Republicans met with FCC Chair Brendan Carr and Republican Study Committee Chair Rep. August Pfluger (Texas) on Wednesday to discuss the evolving media landscape under President Donald Trump's administration.

During the closed-door meeting that Blaze News was given exclusive access to, both Pfluger and Carr addressed concerns about the liberal bias in publicly funded platforms like NPR, as well as the importance of empowering local media.

Carr, who has been an FCC commissioner since 2017, homed in on the importance of free speech and the First Amendment and also of applying existing regulations evenly rather than to advance a political agenda.

'The RSC is committed to working alongside Chairman Carr to dismantle the censorship cartel, strengthen America's digital infrastructure through free-market principles, and restore free-speech rights for everyday Americans.'

"For too long in this government, particularly the last couple of years, your last name dictated how the government treated you," Carr said. "If your last name was Soros, the commission bent over backwards and gave you a special, unprecedented commission-level shortcut to buy 200 radio stations. If your last name was Musk, then you lost $800 million contracts that you lawfully got."

"Everybody now is going to get a fair shake going forward," Carr added.

In the meeting, Carr laid out a four-step plan to reduce media bias and restore the FCC's core principles, which include reining in Big Tech censorship, reinvigorating trust in national and local media, putting forward both economic and permitting reforms, and bolstering aspects of our national security.

With the support of Pfluger and RSC members, Carr is confident that he can accomplish these directives.

"We thank Chairman Carr for his bold leadership in confronting malign influences like George Soros that corrupt our media and silence conservative voices, and the committee fully supports his efforts to restore truth to our public disclosure while expanding broadband access to rural communities," Pfluger said.

"The RSC is committed to working alongside Chairman Carr to dismantle the censorship cartel, strengthen America's digital infrastructure through free-market principles, and restore free-speech rights for everyday Americans," Pfluger added.

Carr also spoke about some of the reforms he has already enacted. Prior to his becoming chair, Carr noted, DEI was the second-most highly prioritized core value of the FCC. Since then, Trump has issued an executive order uprooting DEI from all federal entities, and the FCC has followed suit.

"We've ended the FCC promotion of DEI," Carr said. "You would be outraged if you realized how much promoting DEI had been embedded in FCC work. ... We were spending millions and millions of dollars promoting DEI. Meanwhile, what fell by the wayside was the FCC's actual core work — and doing it competently — of connecting Americans."

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