By Andrea Widburg(American Thinker)Conservatives who post on Facebook know that the site routinely censors their content. Now, though, whistleblowers are offering concrete proof confirming what conservatives have intuitively understood: one of the most important vehicles for modern communication has lots of employees who hate conservatives and their ideas.
Three things routinely happen to conservatives on Facebook: (1) Facebook rejects entirely something they post because it violates Facebook’s “community guidelines.” Efforts to get that decision reviewed always fail. (2) Facebook has allowed people to post something, only to slap it with a “disputed” or “fact-checked” label. (3) There’s the infamous “sensitive content” label:
However, when conservatives complain about these common censorship maneuvers, they’re told they’re imagining it. It doesn’t happen because of bias, they’re told. Instead, it’s simply that conservative content is less accurate than that from the more careful and honest progressive outlets. (Please ignore the entire Russia hoax.)
The Wall Street Journal, however, reports that conservatives are neither paranoid nor imagining things. Facebook’s employees — most of whom are fairly recent college grads — are determined to silence conservatives and resist management pleas to be more even-handed. We know this because a whistleblower leaked internal chat boards, allowing us to see their discussions in real time:
Many Republicans, from Mr. Trump down, say Facebook discriminates against conservatives. The documents reviewed by the Journal didn’t render a verdict on whether bias influences its decisions overall. They do show that employees and their bosses have hotly debated whether and how to restrain right-wing publishers, with more-senior employees often providing a check on agitation from the rank and file. The documents viewed by the Journal, which don’t capture all of the employee messaging, didn’t mention equivalent debates over left-wing publications.
Other documents also reveal that Facebook’s management team has been so intently focused on avoiding charges of bias that it regularly places political considerations at the center of its decision making.
Facebook employees, as seen in a large quantity of internal message-board conversations, have agitated consistently for the company to act against far-right sites.
One of the ways the employees on the chat board justify censoring conservatives, says the WSJ, is through the claim that conservative sites push misinformation or hate speech. The problem is that it’s leftists who define those terms. Is it hate speech to say, “All lives matter”? It is if you’re on the left. Is it misinformation to say transgenderism is a mental disorder, not a biological, physical reality? Again, it is if you’re on the left.
Likewise, is it hate speech to say Democrats are inviting illegal aliens in to change American electoral demographics? Again, to the leftists, it is if you’re Tucker Carlson; it isn’t if you’re Joe Biden. And is it misinformation if you say January 6 was just another protest, and one that was less significant than the violence, looting, and murder BLM and Antifa visited on America in 2020, as opposed to the Democrat narrative calling grannies in the Capitol an “insurrection”? Again, it is if you’re a leftist.
And of course, anything involving deviation from the leftist COVID and vaccine narrative is “misinformation.” It’s irrelevant that conservatives have consistently been proven right about the failure of lockdowns and masks, the damage lockdowns and masks do to children, the survivability of COVID, and the danger and ineffectiveness of indiscriminate mass vaccinations.
In other words, young leftists are incapable of distinguishing between subjective and objective reality. This leaves them arguing that anything that comes from conservatives is automatically hate speech or misinformation because they disagree with it. No wonder Facebook employees are obsessed with Breitbart, which is loud and proud about conservatism.
The fascinating thing is that management understands the risks from the employees’ demands for censorship:
After a staffer asked about removing Breitbart, a senior researcher responded, “I can also tell you that we saw drops in trust in CNN 2 years ago: would we take the same approach for them too?” he wrote.
By 2020, Facebook had begun keeping track of “strikes” for content deemed false by third-party fact-checkers. Repeat offenders could be suspended from posting. Escalations came more frequently against conservative outlets, according to the report.
The WSJ exposé is long and detailed, and the message is clear: academia has churned out thousands of committed leftists who have control over Americans’ communications because the public square has shifted to social media. These people are uninformed, close-minded, and incapable of distinguishing between objective and subjective facts, and they disdain the First Amendment’s commitment to free speech. Be afraid; be very afraid.
