With the election year heating up, the knives have come out for Facebook once again as the media looks to destroy a competitor they feel is too accepting of conservatives.
“Facebook cannot be reformed,” Charlie Warzel writes in the opinion section of the New York Times. “We need to change our demands.” He floats ideas such as having the site clear everybody’s friends and likes and make them build from scratch or even getting rid of Facebook and starting over. Joe Biden has demanded that Facebook stop “giving special consideration to ‘right-leaning publishers'” such as President Trump.
CNN decided to push it a step further, cheerleading the recent advertising boycott while stigmatizing businesses that don’t take part. In a piece titled “These are the big brands that haven’t pulled ads from Facebook yet,” they bemoan that the businesses with “the most leverage” have not returned comment. They later changed the title of the piece, but the original tweet shows the increasingly activist cable network’s original intent.
These are the big brands that haven’t pulled ads from Facebook yet https://t.co/Nh9BQwX0nO
— CNN (@CNN) July 1, 2020
The Left and the media (but I repeat myself) have been after Facebook since the 2016 election, in which they tried to argue that a few little-seen Russian-produced memes on the platform had deprived Hillary Clinton of the presidency. But the real reason the media has an ax to grind is that Facebook is a platform where conservative and right-wing accounts have a lot of reach completely outside of their influence.
Top-performing posts on Facebook today (link posts only, ranked by interactions, data from @crowdtangle) are from:
1. Donald J. Trump
2. Franklin Graham
3. Fox News
4. Fox News
5. Ben Shapiro
6. Ben Shapiro
7. Ben Shapiro
8. Blue Lives Matter
9. Occupy Democrats
10. Sean Hannity— Kevin Roose (@kevinroose) June 16, 2020
Outlets such as CNN and the New York Times have seen their influence wane in recent decades, but never more than in the social media era. People now use social media to bypass them.
Once the gatekeepers of information, they have watched as a right-wing media ecosystem has sprouted up around them organically. It began with talk radio, expanded into cable news, then exploded with social media.
Twitter has been bludgeoned into censoring conservative content, but Mark Zuckerberg has said that Facebook won’t be pressured into doing the same. This is a problem for CNN and its kin, as they want to regain the monopoly they once enjoyed on the public conversation.
Conservatives should not fall over themselves to praise Zuckerberg for doing the right thing. A lot of this is a business calculation, and the company still has its own flaws that are worth highlighting. Still, his willingness so far to face down the would-be censors is laudable. The media’s determination to break Facebook demonstrates that Facebook is a threat to the would-be gatekeepers in the media, not a threat to democracy.
