Twitter, Facebook, and Google: See No Evil, Hear No Evil...
Though the gathering congressional criticism of the social media is marked by significant bipartisan agreement on issues like privacy, there’s another issue that divides legislators along party lines: the degree to which companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter discriminate against conservatives.
Most congressional Democrats and progressives claim to see no substance in the allegation, while Republicans and conservatives have grown ever more critical of practices like the deplatforming, demonetization, and shadow banning of right of center websites, think tanks, and individuals.
Because of social media’s refusal to reveal much of anything about their algorithms or decision-making processes, the evidence of bias is primarily anecdotal. But it is an anecdotal list that is already substantial and growing apace. Consider, among scores of other examples, the following:
Earlier this year, Google labeled the Claremont Institute’s The American Mind a “racially or ethnically oriented publication” and banned the Institute from advertising its 40th anniversary gala with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. According to Claremont, “what offended Google’s bots was Claremont’s campaign against identity politics and political correctness.” (After Claremont went public with its protest of this matter, Google said it had made a mistake.)
In August of last year, Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey admitted during an interview on CNN that his company’s employees have a largely left-leaning bias, though he averred that none of that colors Twitter’s content practices. (It should be noted that this is the same dubious argument made by news organizations like the New York Times and the Washington Post, when admitting that the overwhelming majority of their writers and editors are similarly left-leaning.)
At the White House summit on Silicon Valley’s censoring of conservative voices, held in July of this year, the head of the Susan B. Anthony List, a pro-life organization, claimed that Facebook and Twitter have demonstrated their opposition to them in myriad ways, including the banning of paid ads and the censoring of two SBA List videos.
And then there is the recently published book by Blake Harris. Titled “The History of the Future,” the book is an account of the virtual reality headset company, Oculus, and its founding by a 21-year-old man named Palmer Luckey. It makes for a fascinating read as it recounts Oculus’s rapid ascent from a crowd-funded startup to a company that was acquired by Facebook for the staggering price of $3 billion dollars — even before there was a product to market!
Infuriatingly, however, the book also amplifies glaring evidence of political bias on the part of Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg.
As reported, Palmer Luckey was a libertarian who fancied Donald Trump even before he declared his candidacy for the presidency. Which is why, in 2016, he donated $10,000 to a pro-Trump nonprofit organization called Nimble America, which proposed to buy anti-Clinton billboards around the country.
When the reliably tendentious Daily Beast got hold of this news they wrote a piece under the headline “Palmer Luckey: The Facebook Near-Billionaire Secretly Funding Trump’s Meme Machine.” The piece went on to trash Nimble America and its founders, indirectly shaming Palmer Luckey for his contribution to it. And then the rest of Silicon Valley’s politically correct minions piled on, leading to the result that, in March of 2017, Luckey was fired. This, even after being forced, according to the Wall Street Journal — by Facebook and Zuckerberg personally — to publicly deny his political support of Trump, and instead to say he was supporting the Libertarian candidate, Gary Johnson, for president in 2016!
With such as this as their political and ideological baggage, it’s clear that lots of Republicans and conservatives would like to see most of the social media get their heads handed to them by Congress, the FTC, or the Justice Department. And indeed, investigations are underway at all three venues, not so much on the subject of their political bias, but of their alleged antitrust violations.
But as many experts have opined, antitrust investigations are tricky, lengthy, expensive, and very hard to handicap. Which is why, much as they have it coming to them, it is by no means certain that any of the governmental investigations of the social media will amount to anything.
As prosaic as it sounds, the best result would come about if large numbers of people stopped using Google for search, and Facebook and Twitter for communication.
Patrick Maines is the President Emeritus of The Media Institute, one of the country’s leading First Amendment think tanks.
