Are We Talking About the Same Facebook?
This is just precious.
In one of the millions of alternative universes occupied by American liberals, conservatives are running roughshod over the poor, downtrodden leftists on Facebook and big, bad Mark Zuckerberg is letting them get away with it.
Example 1 comes to us from NBC News in August:
Facebook has allowed conservative news outlets and personalities to repeatedly spread false information without facing any of the company’s stated penalties, according to leaked materials reviewed by NBC News.
According to internal discussions from the last six months, Facebook has relaxed its rules so that conservative pages, including those run by Breitbart, former Fox News personalities Diamond and Silk, the nonprofit media outlet PragerU and the pundit Charlie Kirk, were not penalized for violations of the company’s misinformation policies.
This information was provided to NBC by — YOU GUESSED IT — sources who “spoke anonymously.” They say that they are afraid of “repercussions,” which means they don’t want to get fired for lying.
Democrats have been playing the victim for so long that they truly believe that they’re being unfairly treated on platforms where they make all the rules. If I got mad at politics anymore, this kind of nonsense would do it. Mostly I just pity them.
I’ve actually lost count of how many conservatives I know who have been temporarily suspended or banned permanently on Facebook. Heck, I once got a ten-day suspension there and I don’t do any politics on my main page. Someone had added me as an administrator to a conservative group without my knowledge, which could be done back in the day. The group got suspended and so did I.
On the other hand, I know as many liberals as I do conservatives over there. They post the most outlandish, patently false, inflammatory garbage there every day with impunity. Why? Because they know they can.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was interviewed on Axios on HBO recently and he was having none of this:
Mark Zuckerberg told “Axios on HBO” that it’s “just wrong” to consider Facebook a right-wing echo chamber, even though conservative voices top the platform’s most-engaged content.
- “It’s true that partisan content often has kind of a higher percent of people … engaging with it, commenting on it, liking it,” Zuckerberg told Axios.
- “But I think it’s important to differentiate that from, broadly, what people are seeing and reading and learning about on our service.”
You can see what the problem is there in the first line: “conservative voices top the platform’s most-engaged content.”
The lefties simply can’t believe that they’re not the most popular kids in school. Surely the system is rigged! This is reminiscent of the failed Fairness Doctrine revival attempt several years ago. If they can’t compete, they’ll cry and stomp until the rules get changed to favor them. It’s not an exact comparison, but the motivation and the intent are the same.
We all know how precarious this is for conservatives. They may be getting the engagement now, but every social media platform can be rather capricious about who gets to stay at the party. It’s never the liberals who are sent away.
It’s not an echo chamber. We’re not dominating the largest social media platform in the world, we’re just doing very well in our corner of it.
The real problem for the lefties is simply that we are there at all.
The left occupies a headspace where they can’t fathom that people with different opinions exist in great numbers. That’s because they tend to congregate in coastal enclaves and surround themselves with people exactly like them. Then they wander onto Facebook and encounter the abject horror that is diversity of thought.
“How can there be so many?!?!?”
The poor dears rarely react well to encounters with real America. They’d prefer that all of the icky wrongthink folk be sent back to our barns and gagged forever.
Sorry, libs. We’re here, and we’re prettier than you.
And we think we’ll stay awhile.
Zuckerberg Is Right—Facebook Isn’t the News Hall Monitor for Stupid People
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PJ Media Senior Columnist and Associate Editor Stephen Kruiser is the author of “Don’t Let the Hippies Shower” and “Straight Outta Feelings: Political Zen in the Age of Outrage,” both of which address serious subjects in a humorous way. Monday through Friday he edits PJ Media’s “Morning Briefing.” His columns appear twice a week.
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