At some point, the financial bottom line of tech giants surely will suffer from their habit of earning hatred from half the population.
Facebook, Twitter, Google, and others appear to have made an art of discriminating against conservative viewpoints. It’s gotten to the point where conservatives in the marketplace, not to mention like-minded lawmakers, are likely to make those companies pay. The latest flashpoint for conservative ire, now thankfully fixed, was Facebook’s initially “permanent” ban of a children’s book publisher called Heroes of Liberty.
For the grievous sin of using Facebook to advertise children’s books on former President Ronald Reagan, columnist-economist Thomas Sowell, and Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the publisher was deplatformed. Facebook’s explanation was that the company “didn’t comply with our policy on Low Quality or Disruptive Content.”
Oh, the disruptive horrors of using stories of a successful black economist to teach salutary life lessons to youngsters! Humanity justly trembles at the disruptive threat to all that is good and true!
This Facebook ban was particularly tough on Heroes of Liberty because Heroes had built almost its entire marketing campaign around Facebook and Instagram (also owned by Facebook), and it had bought ads directly from Facebook. (It remained unclear how Facebook could legally accept the money but then refuse to let the ads run.) In each of the next 12 months, the publisher intends to release picture biographies on others, including the late actor John Wayne, American founding hero Alexander Hamilton, and the late British Prime Ministers Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher, among others.
As is almost always the case with deplatforming decisions, Facebook offered no specific explanation of how the publisher’s rather anodyne ads for illustrated children’s books violated particular Facebook rules. Instead, it merely referred in general to its operating rules. Nor did it explain why it does consistently accept, without deplatforming, ads for children’s books pushing a left-wing cultural agenda. In effect, Facebook said: “Our rules? You figure them out.”
Fortunately for Heroes, its editor, Bethany Mandel, is not without her own publicity tools. She has a conservative media presence of some note. She took to other social media and to the airwaves to spread word that Facebook had not just blocked the publisher’s account but, even after an appeal, pronounced the “final decision” that “its ads and assets will remain disabled.”
The firestorm of response must have been intense because, within 24 hours, Facebook correctly reversed its “final decision” and reinstated the account. Facebook “policy communications manager” Andy Stone announced on Twitter that “this should not have happened, It was an error and the ad account’s been restored.”
But what was the error exactly? An “error” is when you accidentally hit “OK” instead of “Cancel.” The decision to censor a company is presumably not an “error” one simply makes by fat-fingering something. Even if computer algorithms sometimes have glitches in their initial determinations, presumably an actual human being reviews appeals. And upon appeal, Facebook had haughtily told Heroes that its decision was final.
Stone, a longtime staffer for liberal politicians such as left-wing former Sen. Barbara Boxer, former Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, somewhat belatedly replied to my initial inquiries by repeating that “this was an error” and referring to his tweets.
Within five minutes, I asked these follow-up questions: “How does such an error get made? On what grounds was the account originally blocked? Is there some algorithm, or are there human screeners, or both, or what? And why is it that it almost always seems to be conservatives who get de-platformed?”
I have received no answer from Stone.
Let’s grant Facebook partial credit for reversing its awful decision. Still, there’s no excuse for its repeated and obvious institutional bias against conservatives. No wonder so many conservatives want Facebook to do a major, permanent face-plant.
Editor’s Note: Bethany Mandel’s husband, Seth, is editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.
