Facebook Is Punishing Liberal Sites And Rewarding Conservative Ones
Zuckerberg is allowing certain publications to flagrantly violate Facebook’s rules while retroactively punishing hundreds of other publishers.
by Bob Cesca
I’ve always preferred Twitter to Facebook. In fact, these days, I prefer severe testicular injuries to Facebook, and if I could hastily abandon Mark Zuckerberg’s data-mining operation, I would do it. Unfortunately, I need to promote my work, so I hold my breath and deal with Facebook’s ongoing fuckery. Frankly, I envy those who can bail out whenever they choose.
You might’ve heard that Twitter’s Jack Dorsey has decided to summarily ban all political advertising on his platform -- another reason why Twitter continues to be my thing. Yes, Twitter is screechy, obnoxious, and there are still too many trolls and creepazoids dodging the terms of service, but whenever I’m on Twitter, which is most of the day, I feel like I’m plugged into the hub, the nerve center of the political discourse, for better or worse. Nothing could be more educational, entertaining, and relentlessly infuriating on the internet than Twitter, and -- lord help me -- I’m happy to be there.
On the same day when Twitter took decisive action to thwart the blitzkrieg of paid propaganda, Facebook executives, on the other hand, announced they were banning eggplant and peach emojis whenever they’re posted with sexual intent. Put another way: One platform’s busily confronting a serious crisis, while the other platform is regulating dick-shaped produce. Remind me again which platform deserves our attention and which platform should be ejector-seated onto the social-network slagheap with the likes of Friendster and MySpace.
As if that weren’t bad enough, Zuckerberg shrugged off the fact that, despite hiring fact checkers, political ads with known falsehoods are still being approved and posted by his corporate goons. Likewise, we just heard that Zuckerberg is allowing certain publications to flagrantly violate Facebook’s rules -- rules that Facebook more or less invented retroactively to punish hundreds of publishers a little more than a year ago in a mass-banning effort known colloquially as “the purge.”
On October 11, 2018, the platform Thanos-snapped around 800 U.S.-based accounts, disappearing the pages forever, presumably for uploading political propaganda. While some of the accounts could be shoehorned into the category of propaganda, many of the accounts were run by legitimate publications, with pages featuring links to the accompanying websites, as well as links to partner sites.
My girlfriend and podcast partner, author and blogger Kimberley Johnson, was among the users who were purged that day, in addition to other liberal accounts like Reverb Press and Nation in Distress. Despite having spent hours per day for years posting content on Facebook, and despite following the terms of service as they existed at the time, she lost several of her pages, her personal profile account, and even her secret friends-and-family page.
The page run by the publication she worked for at the time, Liberals Unite, was also obliterated as was her ability to earn a living as a writer. All those years and years of effort, photos, ideas, connections -- lost in an instant. No warnings, no temporary suspensions, no three-strikes. Just vanished with the snap of Zuckerberg’s sweaty fingers, mainly because he screwed up royally, stupidly accepting Russia money in 2016 and was facing government regulations, but also because he’s a sociopath.
Making matters worse, there was no one to whom she could appeal her removal. The only thing she heard back from Facebook was that she engaged in “inauthentic behavior.” Specifically, she would routinely post the same links across several pages -- links to articles she wrote or articles she thought were valuable or interesting. There wasn’t any rule against doing such a thing, but the A.I. bots or admins at Facebook decided that doing so was “inauthentic” even though it’s something many of us with several pages on Facebook often do. I know I promote my own work on both by podcast Facebook page and my personal one.
My hunch is Facebook was merely interested in telling Congress and the Trump administration that they snuffed out a bunch of political propagandists, including many liberal pages -- a move that coincided with Trump’s griping about how social media was only cracking down on conservatives like Alex Jones. This was pure politics. A scam to sidestep government pressure. Nothing else. Hence the harsh, warningless removal of those 800 pages.
You know how else I know it was a scam? Ben Shapiro’s The Daily Wire has been doing exactly what Kimberley and others were permanently banned for doing. An investigation by the Popular Information newsletter revealed:
“...a network of 14 large Facebook pages that exclusively promote content from The Daily Wire. None of the pages reveal their connection to The Daily Wire, and many purport to be independent media outlets. Conservative News and nearly all of the other sites in the network publish the same content from The Daily Wire, at the same time, with the same text. In other words, they are centrally controlled.”
This is exactly what Kimberley was doing, but somehow, more than a year later, Ben Shapiro is still doing it. And, shocker, it’s actually working. While The Daily Wire only publishes around a thousand posts per month, contrasted with, say, The Washington Post’s 10,000 items per month, The Daily Wire’s number of “engagements” per post literally dwarfed everyone from The New York Times to USA Today and all points between.
It seems The Daily Wire is still permitted to feed off the geyser of traffic provided by Facebook’s popularity -- a geyser, by the way, that used to be available to everyone until late 2013 when Facebook began to throttle the reach of pages run by outside publishers like The Banter.
It gets worse. Many of the Facebook pages run by Shapiro’s outfit are presented as if they’re organic pages run by regular people -- not a word about any affiliation with The Daily Wire.
When Facebook's Head of Cybersecurity Policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, was contacted by Popular Information, the executive said that while, yes, The Daily Wire engages in “inauthentic behavior,” Facebook has no plans to purge any of the affiliated pages or users.
Does this double-standard remind you of anything? It should. For decades, far-right conservatives drilled it into our heads that the press, especially the television news media, possessed a liberal bias. After being tenaciously hectored by conservative activists and political leadership, editors and production executives gave up. In order to stop the screaming, they decided to overcompensate by featuring more right-wing guests than liberals, namely on the Sunday public affairs shows and on cable news.
And now, it looks like Facebook has acquiesced, too, overcompensating with the same lop-sided submissiveness.
Facebook is holding us all hostage. The fear of missing out, and our own personal odysseys -- maintaining our friendships and social media branding -- is keeping us chained to the Facebook radiator through all of the platform’s ongoing indignities. But it doesn’t have to be like that. We have a choice to either bail out of Facebook entirely, which I would love to do but can’t, or we can share the hell out of our favorite liberal-leaning voices and publications -- not by simply liking or commenting on statuses, but by pumping the hell out of the “share” buttons.
And don’t worry about missing out if you decide to leave. Eventually another viable platform will come along to replace Facebook, and everyone on your friend list will migrate to it. And don’t forget… there’s always Twitter.
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