For nearly two decades now, conservatives have been scoffing at Hillary Clinton’s suggestion that there is a “vast right-wing conspiracy,” let alone that it is responsible for the fact that her husband can’t keep it in his pants. However, the statement has also always had a sinister undercurrent, because one suspects the reason Clinton believes in such a conspiracy is pure projection.
Aside from the recent revelation that the Obama administration lied and overtly manipulated a pliant press to sell the Iran deal (for more on that, see Mark Hemingway’s article on page 10), we now know that Facebook, arguably the world’s biggest and most influential source of news, has been actively suppressing stories of interest to and beneficial to conservatives. While Facebook gives the impression it is a neutral platform, it’s anything but. Trending topics on Facebook can expose millions of people to the news of the day, but what trends on Facebook is far from an organic reflection of what people are actually posting on the site.
Facebook employs “news curators” who have the power to blacklist topics that are gaining popularity on the site. An ongoing investigation by the tech blog Gizmodo has revealed that these curators are far from -unbiased. “We choose what’s trending,” a curator told the website. “There was no real standard for measuring what qualified as news and what didn’t. It was up to the news curator to decide.” Not surprisingly, that meant keeping stories from highly trafficked conservative news sources such as TheBlaze from trending. But the real smoking gun was a follow-up report in which Gizmodo interviewed former news curators, who were quite open about what was being suppressed:
At the same time this was happening, curators were artificially promoting news and causes that were important to liberals, such as Black Lives Matter, which otherwise wouldn’t have been given as much exposure. Oh, and as it happens, the Facebook executive in charge of trending topics and other news -decisions on the site is a maxed-out Hillary Clinton donor whose own Facebook posts reveal he is emphatically liberal. The culture of Facebook suggests the whole company thinks it has a duty to enhance political correctness. Every week Facebook employees vote in a poll about what questions CEO Mark Zuckerberg gets asked in Q&A sessions within the company. Earlier this year, a sizable number of employees voted to ask Zuckerberg if they had a duty to exercise their opinion-shaping powers to stop Donald Trump.
Now, even a great many conservatives don’t want to see Trump president, but the mounting evidence that powerful institutions (like Facebook) are trying covertly to steer the political process is one reason he’s doing so well. When it comes to the existence of a “vast left-wing conspiracy,” recent events suggest that you’re not paranoid if they’re really out to get you.
