-By Warner Todd Huston
Without a doubt, Facebook has become one of the biggest online forums for Americans — if not the world — to talk to each other. Sadly, CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his management team have chosen sides and decided to bat for team Democrat and then lie about it all. Still, he almost admitted his perfidy during his testimony before Congress this week.
Facebook has been engaging in the systematic silencing of conservatives who have tried to use the social media network just like everyone else, to debate the day’s news and reach out to others who may be of like mind.
Over the last few months, conservative groups have found that their traffic has cratered and many of their contacts can no longer see their posts. Already one prominent conservative website has essentially given up its business because Facebook has throttled its reach.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg continues to insist that he is only trying to stop “fake news” and to make Facebook more user friendly. However, it seems only conservative sites qualify as “fake news” to the biased administrators at Facebook. That’s because they have chosen sides, not because conservatives have more so-called fake news.
The latest conservative squelched by Facebook is the hilarious and energetic duo of Diamond and Silk, the pair of pro-Trump, African American women who became famous on Youtube for their support of Trump’s policies.
The pair reported that they have been going around and around with Facebook’s admins as to their status on Facebook. Ultimately, just this week, Facebook told them that they had been deemed “unsafe for the community” and their content was to be squelched.
“How are we unsafe to the community,” the pair asked their fans.
“If a privately owned bakery has to go against their Christian values to bake a cake, then Mark Zuckerberg is going to have to suck it up buttercup and allow Diamond and Silk to speak our truth,” they said.
.@DiamondandSilk: "If a privately owned bakery has to go against their Christian values to bake a cake, then Mark Zuckerberg is going to have to suck it up buttercup and allow Diamond and Silk to speak our truth." pic.twitter.com/LnukaSjwD4
— Fox News (@FoxNews) April 8, 2018
So, what exactly happened? Well, the fact is, Facebook attacked Diamond and Silk because they were conservative, NOT because they were a danger to anyone. Granted they are a “danger” to liberalism, but they are no danger to Facebook’s users.
Even as he denied his bias, Zuckerberg tired to wave off the attack on Diamond and Silk as a mere “accident.”
During his testimony on Wednesday Zuckerberg explained that his company made an “enforcement error” when it censored the popular conservative commentators.
Texas Republican Joe Barton began his questioning of the Facebook founder and CEO reading to him a message he received over Facebook asking why Facebook had censored the popular Trump-supporting African American duo of Diamond and Silk.
Zuckerberg said it was all just a big mistake:
“In that specific case,” Zuckerberg replied, “our team made an enforcement error. And we have already got in touch with them to reverse it.”
Barton went on to praise Facebook as a “success story” for growing to over 2 billion users. But the congressman then said, “It’s such an integral part of certainly young Americans’ lives that you need t work with Congress and the community to ensure that it is a neutral safe, and to the largest extent possible private platform.”
“I do agree that we should work to give people the fullest free expression that is possible. That’s what when I talk about giving people a voice, that’s what I care about,” Zuckerberg replied.
But, how true is this?
Later Louisiana Republican Steve Scalise asked Zuckerberg how it is that the social media giants vaunted algorithm only seems to censor conservative sites.
Scalise noted that the new algorithm that was implemented to put a stop to “fake news” only hurt conservative sites.
Zuckerberg insisted that there is no bias to his software.
Scalise asks Zuckerberg is there was an algorithm chance that demoted conservative content on Facebook.
Conservative pages have lost huge traffic since February compared to leftist pages that were not hit.
Zuckerberg denies.
He's lying of course, because he's not under oath. pic.twitter.com/mkwaHpZvMn
— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) April 11, 2018
Zuckerberg really did not adequately answer the question. But the evidence Scalise was talking about makes it pretty clear that the algorithm targeted conservatives almost exclusively.
Tech Giants Google and Facebook are currently purging conservative content from Facebook and YouTube — They are hiding conservative stories on Google — They are shadow-banning conservative news on all social media.
In February Facebook launched a new algorithm to ensure that conservative news would not spread on the social media platform.
This was after Facebook announced it was losing 50,000,000 user hours a day in the previous quarter.
The algorithm change caused President Donald Trump’s engagement on Facebook posts to plummet a whopping 45%.In contrast, Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) do not appear to have suffered a comparable decline in Facebook engagement.
Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas also got in a few good licks on the Facebook chief.
Cruz went right to the point with Zuckerberg asking why only conservatives have been censored on Facebook. In a Wednesday editorial, Cruz laid out his case:
When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before a Senate Judiciary Committee and Commerce Committee joint hearing Tuesday, I asked a relatively simple question: does Facebook consider itself a neutral public forum?
Zuckerberg said that Facebook is a “platform for all ideas,” but declined to give a “yes” or “no” answer. The problem is, this is not merely an academic distinction between words. Facebook’s answer to the question could affect millions of users, and attract (or prevent) a lot of attention from federal regulators.
Clearly Zuckerberg lied, though.
Cruz continued:
As I expressed to Mark Zuckerberg, as a private business Facebook has a clear First Amendment right to publish whatever it wants on its website within the bounds of the law. The company can support political causes and oppose ones it disagrees with, just like a private citizen can speak his or her mind or agitate against opposing views.
But if Facebook is busy censoring legal, protected speech for political reasons, the company should be held accountable for the posts it lets through. And it should not enjoy any special congressional immunity from liability for its actions.
As we discussed at the Senate hearing, for years it has been evident that Facebook has actively censored or suppressed conservative speech.
In May 2016, Gizmodo reported that Facebook had purposely and routinely suppressed conservative stories from trending news, including stories about the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Mitt Romney and Obama administration scandals.
Facebook’s actions have ranged from seemingly petty things – like shutting down a “Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day” to blocking posts from journalists, specific religious groups and most recently, grassroots Trump supporters Diamond and Silk.
Facebook’s explanation for limiting access to a popular page with 1.3 million Facebook followers was that it was “unsafe to the community.” Many Americans see this as just the latest poor excuse in a pervasive pattern of political bias.
While such stories abound, it is virtually unheard of to see any ads or pages from liberal groups like Planned Parenthood, Moveon.org, or Democratic candidates being targeted for removal.
Whether you call it targeting, censorship, or shadow-banning, these are not the actions of a “neutral public forum.”
It looks like Facebook is definitely targeting conservatives and letting liberal sites go unmolested. Facebook has shut down the free exchange of ideas on its forum. It has chosen sides. And it should suffer the consequences for that lie.
____________
“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Follow Warner Todd Huston on:
Twitter
Facebook
Tumblr
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing news, opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that wrote articles on U.S. history for several American history magazines. Huston is a featured writer for Andrew Breitbart’s Breitbart News, and he appears on such sites as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, YoungConservatives.com, and many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
For a full bio, please CLICK HERE.
NOTE: If you want to comment, for some reason our Facebook comments section takes a bit of time to load. It’ll pop up soon. Thanks