Even before the Democratic Party-media industrial complex settled on Russiagate to explain how Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election, there was Facebook and fake news.
Eight years after Barack Obama earned universal plaudits for his campaign’s novel ability to galvanize social media, Facebook became the scapegoat to cover for the DNC’s coronation of Queen Hillary, giving Donald Trump the only candidate he could possibly beat.
Although the Russia collusion hoax came to dominate the discourse, Congress would continue to call Facebook and fellow social media giants such as Twitter and Google every so often for questioning. Beating up on Big Tech became a bipartisan affair, with Trump egging on Republicans to rip on social media as angrily as Democrats did. And despite the gerontocracy’s continued tech illiteracy, radical proposals such as abolishing Section 230 and breaking up private, competitive companies became bipartisan consensus on the Hill.
Tuesday’s congressional hearing, with a Pied Piper disguised as a Facebook whistleblower, proves why the whole idea should be abandoned. This is no scheme to hobble big tech — rather, it’s a vast left-wing conspiracy between the Democratic Party and its agents in the media to transform social media from the greatest platform of conservative thought into an arm of the administrative state.
The so-called whistleblower in question is data engineer Frances Haugen, who spent just two years as a low-level staffer at Facebook before stealing tens of thousands of internal documents to leak to the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Wall Street Journal.
The documents are hardly groundbreaking. They reveal that the company has a special program called XCheck that whitelisted major public figures ranging from Trump to Elizabeth Warren from normal content moderation. (For all the conservatives moaning about social media bias, this program’s existence proves that Facebook went out of its way not to censor major GOP figures such as Trump and Candace Owens). Internal research indicated that Instagram made teenage girls feel worse about their body images and mental health. (Spoiler alert: Almost everything under the sun makes teenage girls feel worse about their body images and mental health — it’s called high school.)
One of the least surprising stories showed that Facebook’s modification of its algorithm to optimize engagement — you know, how literally every website on the planet generates revenue — wound up prioritizing more controversial content.
None of this is groundbreaking. If anything, it shows that Facebook is a hell of a lot more thoughtful in trying to avoid major political censorship and understand the ramifications of its products. Yet Congress and the corporate media have responded as though Haugen just leaked the Pentagon Papers. To understand why, let’s just understand a bit about Haugen herself.
She is a leftist backed by the same legal team that spearheaded Trump’s first impeachment. She alleged racial and gender bias at her previous employers, Gigster and Google, and as reported by Luke Rosiak, she made more than 20 federal campaign contributions since 2016, all of which went to Democrats, including the socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Haugen did not reveal that Facebook was skirting the law in any way or defrauding its investors or users. Everyone in the digitized world knows teenage girls get jealous. Monitoring content generated by nearly half the planet is difficult. Optimizing engagement is how you make money. So, ask yourself, why did the fossils over at 60 Minutes roll out the red carpet to let this Karen give a master class in fearmongering? Because the corporate media such as CBS and Democrats are on the same side, and news flash — it’s against conservatives and their ability to use Facebook.
My friend Robby Soave has literally written the book on this, but the corporate media regard Facebook as a direct competitor. It’s not hard to see why. Prominent conservative pages and personalities such as Ben Shapiro, the Daily Caller, Dan Bongino, and Breitbart regularly top the site’s most popular posts and articles of the day. By democratizing story selection, Facebook has given independent and conservative thought more of a platform than the traditional media would ever allow. Corporate media hate Facebook platforming heterodox thought almost as much as it hates Facebook stealing its profits.
The Silicon Valley offices of Big Tech skew liberal, and conservatives are right to be irked that content moderation is not equally applied. But the corporate media and the Left are aligned here for a reason, and conservatives would be wise to realize that Facebook is an ally in this matter, however imperfect it may be.
