In an unintentionally hilarious piece, Brian Fung writes for CNN Business that “A right-wing offensive is underway to discredit social media companies just days before the election.” Fung simultaneously manages to wave away the fact that liberals have also targeted Big Tech while ignoring the basis of conservative complaints about their biases.
Fung’s piece makes no mention of the New York Post story on Hunter Biden’s laptop, which has left the New York Post staff locked out of their official Twitter account for 12 days and counting. According to Fung, previous conservative complaints of tech bias have “evolved,” seemingly out of nowhere, to the point that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey are facing subpoenas to testify before Congress.
Fung manages to ignore a lot of the last four years in Big Tech discussions. Ever since Hillary Clinton’s loss in the 2016 presidential election, Facebook has been the target of liberal ire. Hillary Clinton still can’t stop attacking Zuckerberg, the “authoritarian” who “intends to reelect Trump.” Perhaps Fung also missed CNN itself targeting Facebook, listing companies who refused to pull their ads from the social media website during a boycott in July while complaining that they had too much leverage to be bothered to respond to CNN.
According to Fung, Republican complaints about Big Tech are a bad faith attack, whereas Democratic complaints are legitimate. He uses the time honored “experts said” trope of presenting an argument, arguing that Republicans are trying to sow distrust in social media just like they do with executive agencies and legacy media. He even tries to tie it to judicial confirmations.
Big Tech and social media companies have been just as frequent a target of the political left as of the political right. Progressives want the sites to better police “hate content” and attempt to browbeat them into banning more content (as the summer attempt at a Facebook ad boycott shows).
Tech companies are obviously biased against right-wing and conservative content. Seventy-eight percent of political donations from Facebook and its affiliates go to Democrats, compared to just over 10% to Republicans. The numbers are more lopsided for Twitter: Democrats have received nearly 84% of donations, whereas Republicans have seen a whopping 0.11%. Yes, conservatives typically top the engagement list for Facebook, but they’re also the first targets of “misinformation” and “hate” crackdowns.
Democrats have crowed about Facebook for years because of a few Russian memes. Twitter has locked out a prominent newspaper in the weeks before an election for publishing content detrimental to Joe Biden. To pretend Democrats don’t try to “discredit” social media companies is partisan; to pretend social media companies themselves aren’t partisan actors in an election cycle is a fantasy.
