Republicans are turning their grievances about biased tech companies into a rallying message for a difficult election year.

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel are among the GOP leaders vocally complaining about a host of Silicon Valley slights against conservatives, ranging from Facebook’s stripping of ad revenue from the video-blogging duo Diamond and Silk to a Google search result that paired the California GOP with “Nazism.”


So is Brad Parscale, who ran Donald Trump’s winning digital campaign in 2016 but now, as the reelection campaign manager for the social-media-loving president, says it’s past time for a reckoning with companies like Facebook and Twitter.

Conservative complaints about Silicon Valley have sprouted in the past year, echoing the frequent GOP accusations that liberal news media and a pervasive bureaucratic “deep state” are conspiring against Trump’s agenda. But the anti-tech message appears to be accelerating as Republicans fight to fire up their base and counter a feared Democratic “blue wave” in November.

Meanwhile, tech executives are scrambling to prove they don’t harbor anti-conservative prejudice. Facebook has held at least two previously unreported meetings with conservative groups and digital experts since April, and it launched an audit of potential bias with the assistance of former Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) and the law firm Covington & Burling.

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But the industry may find peace with conservatives elusive.

“Our supporters out there, by and large, believe that that’s true — that a lot of these tech companies have an agenda,” Senate Commerce Chairman John Thune (R-S.D.) said in an interview in the Capitol. “And that is to kind of censor some of the more conservative-leaning content and thought that gets put up on their platforms.

“I think it’s a real issue, but I also think it probably has some political value,” Thune added.

A Republican strategist said the issue fits right in with other issues the GOP is messaging on leading up to the midterms.

“All campaigns are opportunistic,” said the strategist, who requested anonymity to speak freely. “The reality is too, though, the reason they’re capitalizing on this, is that there are repeatedly instances for them to analyze and highlight. It’s something Trump has talked about repeatedly, it’s a base motivator, you’re not going find conservatives who don’t believe there’s bias.”

The involvement of Parscale and other Republicans deeply invested in national electoral politics “makes for a feedback loop that’s being generated,” the strategist said, and “campaigns are reflecting the messaging of what’s going on.”

Industry representatives reject the allegations of bias.

“Facebook was built to give people a voice, regardless of their political beliefs,” Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said. He said the platform doesn’t suppress content on the basis of political viewpoint or keep people from seeing content they want to see.

Still, GOP voters broadly seem to be taking note. A Pew Research Center survey found in June that a considerable majority of Republicans believe social media platforms are biased in favor of liberal views and deliberately censor conservative ones. That perception of persecution might be a motivator for Republicans heading into the fall.

The industry has been trying to make amends for any real or perceived bias since at least mid-2016, when conservatives began complaining about the selection of stories in Facebook’s “trending” news feature. Tech has ramped up the defensive moves in recent months, amid a broader backlash over issues like data security and growing attention for the conservative grievances in particular.

The April event with the Competitive Enterprise Institute saw Facebook officials, including a former aide to ex- House Speaker John Boehner and a former RNC official, walk conservatives through tweaks to the site’s newsfeed and political ad policy. But the event, which hasn't previously been reported, wasn’t the win Facebook might have been hoping for: One of the dozens of attendees said the Facebook staffers “clearly had no good answers” to conservatives’ complaints about the changes.

Facebook officials again met with various conservative groups June 20, convening at The Heritage Foundation in connection with the bias review. Bill Wichterman, a former Bush administration official who is now a senior adviser with Covington helping to lead the audit, said in an interview that the meeting was part of an information gathering process that will continue for several more weeks. Covington is preparing a report cataloging all the ways conservatives feel they have been disadvantaged by Facebook’s policies and practices. The report is being kept under wraps and will be delivered to Facebook when the audit is complete, Wichterman said.

Also in June, four Republican Facebook executives met with Parscale, McCarthy and McDaniel to discuss ways the social media giant can improve its image among conservatives. That same month, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey swung through D.C. and met with conservative groups in an attempt to mend fences.

Just last week, Parscale downplayed the apparent tension that comes with hating on social media while heavily relying on it for the Trump campaign. “Not my fault people don’t understand the platform,” he tweeted. “You can censor but still allow your ad network to make $$. Bias doesn’t mean they don’t want to make money. Many outlets take our ad money even if they are bias junk.”

He added: “Ask @jack [Twitter CEO Dorsey]. He is more than happy to take our $$$. I’m pretty positive he wishes he could censor the #maga movement.”

The list of evidence that conservatives have cited to justify their concerns is long and diffuse. It includes, among many other incidents, Twitter’s removal of verification status from some conservative accounts and the booting of others, such as provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, from the platform altogether; the same company’s temporary takedown of an anti-abortion video from Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) for what it called a violation of its terms of service; and Instagram’s decision to place a content warning on searches for the hashtag “#DonaldTrumpJr.”

McCarthy, who has sought to mobilize a social media campaign around the issue using the hashtag "#StopTheBias," told POLITICO he believes it’s resonating with voters. He has no intention of easing back on tech, he said.

“It’s become prevalent throughout the Valley. You look at what happened to the California Republican Party with Google,” McCarthy said, referencing the “Nazism” incident, which Google moved quickly to fix. “And is this a bias just based upon a philosophical belief and individuals are changing their algorithm or they’re individually [altering users’ newsfeeds]?”

McCarthy, who’s eyeing the House speakership, didn’t always have such a frosty relationship with the tech industry.

Tech has historically looked to the California lawmaker for legislative priorities very much in its best interest: low taxes, free trade, changes to patent and surveillance laws, and modernization of the government. McCarthy heads the bipartisan Innovation Initiative, a House coalition pushing legislation to promote technological advancement in government and the private sector. Just last year, a package of McCarthy-sponsored Innovation Initiative bills passed the House, and one was signed into law. The Information Technology Industry Council named him Legislator of the Year in 2012, and in 2014 Facebook executive Joel Kaplan told POLITICO that McCarthy “has his finger on the pulse of Silicon Valley.”

Some in the industry aren’t sure just how much to read into McCarthy's about-face.

“I think he’s mostly just playing to the base. No one in tech really seems to pay too much attention to it. But as a Republican who works with a lot of SF tech people, I definitely see where he’s coming from,” said one tech industry source, who requested anonymity to speak freely. “I’m not entirely sure what his endgame is. But tech is a great whipping boy for conservatives, similar to the media.”

Both the grievance and its political utility were plainly on display in April, when the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing featuring Diamond and Silk. The pro-Trump sister duo’s prickly back-and-forth with lawmakers, dominated by their claims that Facebook deliberately limited access to their videos, got considerable play in conservative media after the hearing.

Blackburn appeared on a panel at the same April hearing to defend the sisters. The lawmaker, who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Communications and Technology Subcommittee and is in a tight Senate race against Democratic former Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen, has for some time been a vocal booster for the claims of anti-conservative bias. She recently published an op-ed on Fox News hinting that tech companies could face regulation if they don’t take decisive steps to root out bias.

“If these companies truly believe in a free and open internet, they should allow an honest and open public discussion — even when that means views they disagree with in ‘flyover country’ are highlighted,” Blackburn wrote. “If they don’t believe in that level of neutrality, perhaps we should heed Mr. Zuckerberg’s advice and consider holding them to a higher standard that acknowledges their responsibility.”

In an interview in the Capitol, Blackburn said voters and constituents in her districts “want to make sure it’s a free and open platform.” Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), chairman of the National Republican Senate Committee, said conservatives are concerned about any “Silicon Valley organization that’s using people in Silicon Valley to filter speech.”

House Energy and Commerce Chairman Greg Walden (R-Ore.) said the onus is on social media companies to prove they’re not biased. He said he was struck by the fact that left-leaning groups and individuals haven’t told lawmakers that they’re being discriminated against, in contrast to claims like Diamond and Silk’s.

“I think these big social media platforms have a very difficult task ahead of them: to prove to their users and the broader community that they’re being fair and not biased,” Walden said. “That’s hard to do.”

Nancy Scola contributed to this report.