Another day, another headline from an “academic” report that makes you want to pull your hair out.
“New report calls conservative claims of social media censorship ‘a form of disinformation,’” the Washington Post blares. The liberal media coverage gleefully seized on a new report out of New York University dubbed “False Accusation: The Unfounded Claim that Social Media Companies Censor Conservatives.”
New @nyuniversity report calls conservative claims of social media censorship ‘a form of disinformation’
via @Cat_Zakrzewski w @aaronjschaffer https://t.co/Z6YKXmXosW— Glenn Kessler (@GlennKesslerWP) February 1, 2021
The report’s authors claim to have studied the available examples and data and found that even though all major tech companies are run almost exclusively by Democrats, the notion that social media censorship is biased against conservatives is a myth.
“The claim of anti-conservative animus on the part of social media companies is itself a form of disinformation: a falsehood with no reliable evidence to support it,” the report concludes.
One can only wonder if the NYU researchers slept through the last five years.
After all, it was only a few months ago that Big Tech companies engaged in an unprecedented blackout of conservative reporting that threatened to hurt Joe Biden’s presidential campaign. The New York Post, a mainstream if somewhat sensationalist outlet and one of the oldest newspapers in America, reported on Biden’s son’s allegedly shady business dealings. The report, the key elements of which have still not been meaningfully debunked, was decried as “disinformation” and promptly blacklisted from all of Twitter — you literally couldn’t share the link — and suppressed on Facebook.
The New York Post was locked out of its Twitter account entirely. It was unable to post any of its journalism, not just the Biden story, for roughly two weeks.
That’s right: In the immediate run-up to an election, Big Tech companies immediately tried to censor a story that could hurt their favored candidate, the Democrat.
They cited vague policies against “unauthorized material” and a broad concern about political misinformation. Interestingly, this standard was never applied against sketchy liberal media reports pushing outlandish claims about then-President Donald Trump’s alleged ties to Russia. Nor was it applied to “unauthorized materials” that were widely reported regarding the former president’s taxes.
This was not a one-off example but part of a much broader, yearslong trend.
Former Facebook employees told reporters that they actively suppressed conservative news stories that were organically trending from the website’s curated trending news. And Facebook had a clear political motive in 2018 when it changed its content curation algorithm, an ostensibly neutral move to promote less “clickbait” news. But conservative websites such as the Daily Caller, the Daily Wire, and even the Wall Street Journal took an enormous traffic referral hit while liberal outlets such as CNN and the Daily Beast thrived.
One thing liberals often point to is that some conservative content, such as posts by Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino, performs quite well on Facebook. But by just looking at the top few individual publishers, they obscure the broader picture. There are many, many more liberal media outlets than there are conservative outlets. Yes, conservative engagement is more concentrated on a few pages that perform well. This does not mean that Facebook is more flush with conservative content.
So no, conservative claims of social media bias are not “disinformation.”
Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is a fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education and a freelance journalist. He was previously a fellow at the Washington Examiner.
