Facebook has privately sought advice from the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian public-policy group, and its founder Anthony Perkins, according to people familiar with those meetings. Twitter’s Chief Executive Jack Dorsey recently hosted dinners with conservatives, including Grover Norquist, the founder and president of Americans for Tax Reform, which advocates for lower taxes. Advisers on the left include the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil-rights group that keeps a list of hate groups…

…While outside groups are technically unpaid, the tech companies contribute to some of the organizations they are seeking out for guidance. Alphabet Inc.’s Google contributes to more than 200 third-party groups, including the Heritage Foundation, National Cyber Security Alliance, and Americans for Tax Reform, according to the company. Facebook and most other companies don’t disclose their donations to outside groups.

Executives see the outreach to a cross-section of groups in part as a form of political protection, to defend against the allegation that they are biased against conservatives, a complaint lodged repeatedly last year by President Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers. Some of the conservative groups tapped recently by tech platforms complain that the companies defer too closely to the Southern Poverty Law Center when defining what constitutes hate speech.

Many companies and other groups rely on the center’s list of hate groups, counting nearly 1,000 across the U.S., according to its website. The group also writes about some of those groups on its “Hatewatch” blog.

Keegan Hankes, a senior research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center, says the group lobbies tech platforms to remove content it considers hate speech, such as when it successfully asked Facebook to remove content posted by the League of the South, a neo-Confederate group.

“Big Tech is an enemy of the American people.”

That’s not me making this claim. It’s not Donald Trump. It’s not even Steve Bannon.

It’s the conservative Heritage Foundation.

“The think tank announced this week “that it is joining the Free Speech Alliance, a coalition of more than 90 conservative organizations working together to ensure conservatives’ free speech online and to hold tech companies accountable when they undermine it.”

The only thing I would say about that statement is that it underestimates the extent of Big Tech’s undermining of free speech. They undermine it every day of the week. They undermine it twice on Sunday. They undermine it more than a billion times a second. They couldn’t possibly undermine it any more than they do. They undermine it every chance they get…

(…)

What did it take to drive the august Heritage Foundation to reach this critical decision?

• In February, YouTube censored a video posted to The Daily Signal’s YouTube channel in which Virginia parent Merianne Jensen criticized unscientific and harmful school mask mandates, claiming it “violated” the platform’s “COVID-19 medical misinformation policy.” (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news site.)
• Last year, Amazon removed paid ads promoting a book by Heritage senior fellow Mike Gonzalez titled, “BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution,” because content that “revolves around controversial or highly debated social topics is not permitted.” After a public pressure campaign, Amazon reversed itself and restored the ads.
• In 2020, one of Heritage’s YouTube videos on gender dysphoria was censored by the company, while in 2019, The Daily Signal reported that YouTube had also removed a similar video on its YouTube channel.
• And in early 2019, then-Heritage President Kay C. James was invited to be a member of Google’s new AI board, only for Google to dissolve the board after an outcry from company employees that James, a conservative, was asked to be on the board.