On Thursday morning, President Trump praised right-wing YouTubers Diamond and Silk as conservative “warriors.” Two hours later, those warriors were peddling dark conspiracies about Silicon Valley’s secret war against their pro-Trump message before a House committee comprised of grim-faced Republicans and exasperated Democrats.
The occasion, a House Judiciary Committee hearing on “Filtering Practices of Social Media Platforms,” was a response to conservative worries about liberal bias or censorship in social media platforms. In the past, conservatives have raised genuine concerns about whether companies with uniformly left-wing leadership teams and office cultures are equipped to make well-informed decisions about what constitutes acceptable content on their platforms. Shockingly, Thursday’s hearing did not address those concerns.
Which should have been obvious from the moment it was announced “Diamond and Silk” would be testifying. The two women, real names Lynnette Hardaway and Rochelle Richardson, rocketed to e-stardom during the 2016 campaign with a novel pitch: They’re black, and they like Trump. They have maintained their notoriety by styling themselves as embattled ideological targets of the very companies, Google (which owns YouTube) and Facebook, which have allowed them to develop a following. Their evidence for this: First, that their YouTube channel was among the accounts demonetized last year after a YouTube policy change intended to protect advertisers from association with explosive or controversial content—an unpopular change among content creators, yes, but one that impacted both left and right. More recently, the two have maintained that Facebook has been deliberately working to suppress their content, citing complaints from their fans that their page is hard to find and a message from Facebook support that their page had been judged “unsafe”—a message Facebook has stated was issued in error.
“Subtly and slowly Facebook used one mechanism at a time to diminish reach by restricting our page so that our 1.2 million followers would not see our content, thus silencing our conservative voices,” Hardaway claimed in her testimony. “When we reached out to Facebook for an explanation, they gave us the run around.”
The discrepancy here is obvious. Diamond and Silk have become, in the minds of some on the right, emblematic of the fight against online suppression of conservative thought—so much so that they were the Judiciary committee’s invitees to speak on the subject. How did they become emblematic of that fight? By accusing the YouTube and Facebook of silencing and suppressing their voices—in posts and videos seen and shared by their million-plus followers on those sites. The disconnect was not lost on ranking member Jerry Nadler: “The witnesses will complain that Facebook has limited the ability of their followers to interact with their Facebook page. But the data show that their Facebook page received more total interactions in March 2018, when they were supposedly being censored, than in March 2017, fresh off President Trump’s victory. So the censorship argument, the central thesis of this hearing, doesn’t hold up under even the most basic scrutiny.”
The YouTubers weren’t the only Republicans in the room spreading misinformation about online censorship. Rep. Marsha Blackburn and Rep. Steve King both said that Google this week “banned a large Lutheran denomination from its ads platform”—a distorted falsehood that not even the denomination in question has claimed. King also made ominous suggestions about Google being responsible for traffic losses to “conservative” sites such as The Gateway Pundit, without mentioning that TGP is one of the Internet’s most notorious popular purveyors of genuinely fake news.
Facebook, Google, and Twitter, likely sensing the insanity to come, opted not to attend the hearing—a fact that was remarked on ominously by many of the Republicans in attendance. “What are they afraid of?” Rep Lamar Smith asked.
