Facebook, a social network originally founded as an Ivy League version of Hot or Not, has billions of users and the power to sway elections. In the U.S., where nearly 70 percent of adults are Facebook users, its recent choices make it clear where the company stands: with the party of Donald Trump.
On the day that the company rolled out one of its biggest new products, the Facebook News tab, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg decided the place he wanted to be on launch day was a media event co-hosted by News Corp.
There, Zuckerberg and News Corp. chief executive Robert Thomson spent an hour yucking it up and reminiscing about old times spent with Thomson’s boss, Rupert Murdoch, who also owns Fox News.
During a short Q&A, Zuckerberg was finally forced to address why the right-wing rag Breitbart was included as an official Facebook news partner.
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The Facebook CEO defended the decision. Zuckerberg consistently described the News tab as dedicated to curating “high-quality news” as if repeating this over and over again somehow qualified Breitbart — a far-right website that features a “Black Crime” category and employed Milo Yiannopoulos, who used his position to harass people and promote white nationalists — as a legitimate news source.
Days later, Campbell Brown, head of Facebook's news partnerships, shared a piece on the site from the News Corp.-owned Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, which is notoriously more conservative than the rest of the paper.
The op-ed defends Facebook’s inclusion of sites like Breitbart as proof the social media company is being fair and balanced. The Wall Street Journal, which is one of the lucky Facebook News partners to get paid, goes so far as to say the far-right outlet Breitbart is evened out by the inclusion of mainstream corporate media outlets like CNN, as if they represent equivalent ends of the political spectrum.
Brown added a blurb of her own in her Facebook post.
“I strongly believe it should be the role of the press to dissect the truth or lies found in political ads - not engineers at a tech company,” Brown writes, unaware that she is fundamentally misunderstanding that her employer’s fact-checking program is performed by third-party outlets and journalists, not Facebook’s programmers.
One such Facebook-approved fact checker is The Daily Caller, a website founded by Fox News’ Tucker Carlson that has a habit of hiring white supremacists.
Not that politicians have to worry about fact-checking — at least when it comes to their ads. In the name of “free speech,” Facebook announced that lawmakers could lie in political advertisements, a policy that should help Donald Trump, who has already spread false information in ads about Joe Biden.
When Mark Zuckerberg was pressed on these new rules by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at a recent congressional hearing, Zuckerberg demurred on specific examples of what sort of disinformation is allowed on the platform. However, the Facebook CEO made it clear that the company shouldn’t be policing political speech.
Except, of course, when it wants to. Adriel Hampton, the founder of a left-wing PAC, set out to test Zuckerberg’s rules. After his group’s false Green New Deal ads were removed, he filed to run as a gubernatorial candidate in California.
For all intents and purposes, Hampton is now officially a politician. Well, not according to Facebook.
“This person has made clear he registered as a candidate to get around our policies, so his content, including ads, will continue to be eligible for third-party fact-checking,” the company said in a statement to CNN.
Facebook has now apparently authorized itself to decide who is and isn’t a legitimate politician.
Further proving Facebook’s bias is a recent investigation by Popular Information, a political newsletter started by Judd Legum, the founder of the shuttered progressive news outlet ThinkProgress. Legum discovered that The Daily Wire, the media outlet founded by conservative pundit Ben Shapiro, was breaking Facebook’s policies to spread its content across the platform.
The investigation found a coordinated network of large right-wing Facebook Pages spamming The Daily Wire links, and only The Daily Wire links. Facebook normally deems this kind of activity "inauthentic coordinated behavior," which is against its policies. As recently as last year, Facebook banned hundreds of left-leaning pages for this very thing.
However, Facebook declined to take action against The Daily Wire when it was approached with this information.
So, why is this all happening now? Ever since a bad faith reading of a 2016 Gizmodo report convinced the right that Facebook was biased against them, the social media giant has gone out of its way to fix that perception. The company shut down the product that was accused of being biased: a human-curated Trending Topics feature. This time around with the very similar News tab, the company has partnered with explicitly right-wing outlets.
Conservative news content, by the way, already owns Facebook. Fox News, Breitbart, and The Daily Caller regularly top the list of the most shared news content on the site.
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Recent stories recount Mark Zuckerberg’s private meetings and dinners with conservative figures, including Tucker Carlson and Sen. Lindsay Graham. Attempts have been made to find an individual on the other end of the aisle having a meal with the Facebook CEO. They have come up empty.
The push for many of these decisions, according to another report by Popular Information, comes from top executives — Vice President for Global Public Policy Joel Kaplan, Vice President for U.S. Public Policy Kevin Martin, and Public Policy Director for Global Elections Katie Harbath — with a history of working in right-wing politics.
Kaplan was a former deputy chief of staff in the George W. Bush administration who joined Facebook in 2011. He's probably most known for appearing behind then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh at his hearing last year as a show of support amidst sexual harassment allegations. Kaplan threw Kavanaugh a party once he was confirmed.
Martin was appointed to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) by George W. Bush in 2001 and then promoted to FCC chairman in 2005. During his time as commission chair, he pushed to deregulate the telecommunications industry.
Harbath worked for Rudy Giuliani's 2008 presidential campaign and then as chief digital strategist for the Republican National Committee. She continued her political career while working at Facebook, acting as a Virginia Republican Convention delegate.
A generous explanation is that Facebook has dangerously overcorrected for the perceived conservative bias. Or maybe the company is just trying to please its growing and increasingly engaged user base of older conservatives.
But, Facebook’s former chief security officer, Alex Stamos, doesn’t see it that way.
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In a series of tweets, Stamos makes the case that Facebook saw Democrats calling to break up Facebook while Republicans simply demanded special treatment, so the company made a calculated decision to curry favor with conservatives.
Perhaps no better visual of this was at that same hearing where Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and other House Democrats pilloried Zuckerberg. Republicans previously took advantage of these congressional hearings to criticize Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other tech executives for perceived bias against conservatives. This time around, however, Republican lawmakers did something completely different. They used the 6-hour hearing to commend Mark Zuckerberg for being a good capitalist and defender of free speech.
"There's another gentleman in this town that I think you and he share a lot together and that's President Trump," said Rep. Barry Loudermilk. "You're both very successful businessmen, you're both capitalist, you're both billionaires."
"You're both very successful businessmen, you're both capitalist, you're both billionaires."
"You're both challenging the status quo," he continued.
Rep. Andy Barr of Kentucky thanked Zuckerberg and told him not to be "bullied by politicians that want to censor politically incorrect speech.”
People can attempt to defend Facebook’s prior bad decisions. Cambridge Analytica breaking Facebook’s policies to steal user data to benefit the Trump campaign? Tech companies have issues with third-party firms all the time. Data breaches will happen! Who could have prepared for foreign influence campaigns to sow discord in elections? Facebook is addressing these issues now!
However, it’s impossible to give Facebook the benefit of the doubt over its recent choices. Zuckerbeg appears to have made calculated decisions and, with that, the transformation of Facebook is complete. The right wing has its own social network now.
Topics Facebook Social Media Donald Trump Politics
