Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) is lauded as America's greatest inventor, as well as the greatest inventor of the Industrial Age. While he certainly was brilliant and prolific, history has more recently revealed the inventor of the incandescent light bulb and the phonograph as having been a narcissistic, greedy autocrat who was not above unduly exploiting other talented people, employing unethical means to protect his profits, or using his power and influence to rig the game in discouraging competition.

In this sense, I think that Edison would have made a model 21st-century socialist.

In recent months, the issue of wildly successful tech companies – in a way, the Edisons of the Digital Age – employing unethical means to gain their objectives has gained a great deal of traction. While these tech giants are certainly making a profit, unlike Edison, profit and market share do not appear to be their primary motivators, if ever they were.

In particular, the policies of online search engine and social media giants like Google, Facebook and Twitter have come under fire for their deliberate and transparent social engineering, manifested through the blatant censorship of conservative individuals and interests while overlooking or implicitly endorsing subversive far left and anti-American interests.

Facebook's privacy policies (for example) have given rise to contention for quite a few years. When confronted, they have either denied that they have a problem, or offered up feeble apologies and solemn promises to do better. This phenomenon, as well as the company's increasing censorship, continue to be at issue. If you've been to a movie theater recently, you might even have gotten a chance to view Facebook's "apology PSA," which addresses its newfound commitment to protecting users' privacy.

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Recently, conservative commentator Candace Owens criticized Facebook after the social media giant censored videos from the conservative website PragerU and then backpedaled, claiming the videos were mistakenly removed.

Last week, Jihad Watch founder and author Robert Spencer warned of "expanding online left-wing political censorship via large technology companies." Citing the practices of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, Spencer said that social media and Silicon Valley tech giants are "pursuing a genuinely totalitarian initiative" in which anyone they deem to be in opposition to their far left ideology is summarily de-platformed, "with no recourse, no appeal, discussion ... nothing."

This is, of course, quite true. The follower counts of conservative users on social media platforms are also being assiduously manipulated by Facebook and Twitter. This past weekend, on an installment of "The Weekend" radio show, host Joe Pagliarulo interviewed the wildly popular former Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke. The former law enforcement officer and vocal Donald Trump supporter complained that while he has been gaining dozens of Twitter followers every day, they seem to inexplicably fall off by a hundred or so every time his follower count closes in on 1 million.

I've had more than one conservative commentator make the same observation to me regarding their Twitter followers. Online literary purveyor Amazon.com also seems to have developed a habit of limiting their star rating when it comes to best-selling conservative books.

Back in March of this year, I wrote a column detailing my woes with online censorship, which ultimately resulted in a decision to take my website offline and dramatically curtail my use of social media. Why? Because if the media I generate is being actively censored by the very entities that provide the opportunities for exposure, then their platforms have ceased to be useful utilities.

Fortunately, writing commentary is not my primary money-making gig, or I would have been in big trouble.

Of course, companies like Google and Facebook will only go so far with the censorship of more prominent conservative individuals and alternative media platforms, because these tend to be able to afford high-powered attorneys. They don't want to risk that kind of exposure on the financial end, nor risk a very loud hue and cry going up for powerful legal intervention on the part of the federal government.

The policies of the Silicon Valley tech giants are not only dangerous from a social engineering standpoint (in that they promulgate subversion and stultify conservatives' views). With the online infrastructure they have in place, tech giants could, for example, ensure that no conservative entrepreneur or small business in America might enjoy (or profit from) an online presence in any way, and sabotage their efforts to succeed every bit as arbitrarily as they currently ban and censor political speech – and leave just as little recourse.

Such action could potentially limit the economic and by extension the political influence of conservatives on an even greater scale.

I've made no secret of the fact that I believe socialists in America ought to be neutralized by any means necessary because, as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich indicated in a recent op-ed for Fox News, socialists invariably get around to killing lots of people as a means to cement their power.

As things stand now, private organizations like Facebook, Twitter, Google and the rest are free to censor as they please, even if they ever-so-closely skirt antitrust laws. In the end, it will be up to consumers to decide whether or not the systematic erosion of their liberties via the manipulation of these companies is worth the value they ostensibly provide.

Long before any other news organization, WND was exposing the coordinated campaign by the "Internet Cartel" – Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Amazon, Apple and others – to silence free speech by censoring and suppressing independent, conservative and Christian expression on the Internet. Here are highlights of WND's groundbreaking news and analysis of what has been called the 21st century's greatest assault on America's fundamental freedoms of speech, press and religion.