Everyone knows who won the 2016 presidential election, but do you know who lost?
Mark Zuckerberg.
The “Facebook Papers” campaign that currently is being fought on every front from The Associated Press to Congress is not just about online safety or social justice — it is about beating Facebook into submission before the next election in order to push the platform into behaving more like Twitter or YouTube, i.e., to make Facebook from a place that is mildly hostile to conservatives into one that is extremely hostile to conservatives.
Facebook has a split personality. Right-leaning entertainers such as Dan Bongino may thrive on the platform, but when something comes along that actually threatens Democratic interests — say, a New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s financial shenanigans — then Facebook goes to extraordinary lengths to quash that content.
Facebook is especially sensitive around Election Day. And that is because the war on Facebook is a direct outgrowth of the angst and wailing and denial that followed Donald Trump’s electoral win in 2016 — an outcome that was blamed, preposterously, on your elderly aunt’s favorite social-media platform.
Much like Republicans in 2020, Democrats in 2016 simply could not accept that their incompetent and unlovable candidate had been whipped in a fair fight by a challenger who seemed to them entirely unfit for the office. This wasn’t the Democrats’ first foray into election kookery: They insisted for the whole of George W. Bush’s presidency that he was illegitimately installed in the office.
But there was no Facebook to blame back in 2000, when Zuckerberg was a sophomore in high school.
Today, the Democrats blame misinformation and fake news every time they suffer a setback. If Hillary Clinton had campaigned a little harder in the swing states, we would probably think about the Russian bots and partisan fake-newsers on Facebook the same way we think about the Nigerian finance ministers who are always e-mailing us with an unbelievable financial opportunity: just one more species of nonsense on an Internet that is full of it.
The so-called Facebook Papers do not, in fact, offer much of an indictment of the company. The notional complaints are that Facebook is not as assertive in screening and policing the approximately 5 billion pieces of content that are posted there as its critics think it should be, that it is not as good about screening content written in Marathi or Amharic as it is posts in English, and that it is not sufficiently deferential to the demands of its internal “woke” faction. That’s a whole lot of nothing.
Critics expect us to be shocked that Facebook’s popular Instagram app is about as good at warping teenaged girls’ perceptions as Cosmo and the Kardashians are, and they want us to blame Facebook for awful things such as political violence in India and fake news leading up to US elections.
But these lamentable situations predate Facebook by generations: Indians massacred as many as 17,000 of their Sikh neighbors in 1984, when their main tools of political organization were telephones and loudspeakers, and then killed another 2,000 of their neighbors in a dispute about a 460-year-old mosque in 1992. Americans were circulating conspiracy theories on fax machines a generation ago, and fake news was a problem in 18th century elections. That isn’t a Facebook problem — that’s a people problem.
Mark Zuckerberg of Philips Exeter, Harvard, and Silicon Valley is silently accused of being a traitor to his class, giving an unnecessary voice to those bumptious hinterlanders “Saturday Night Live” likes to sneer at as “Walmart shoppers.” Progressives have controlled entities such as The New York Times, The Association Press and National Public Radio for so long that they believe they are entitled to act as the national umpires of what is sayable and unsayable, thinkable and unthinkable.
Bullying Facebook corporate and Zuckerberg personally is only a natural extension of Democratic political strategy. We should see it for what it is.
Zuckerberg may have thought he could buy himself some friends by giving $400 million to help local election offices adapt to the COVID-19 epidemic. But what the Democrats want from Zuckerberg and Facebook isn’t politically neutral do-goodism. The Democrats want to control the conversation, period.
Facebook has real problems, including a moribund geriatric user base in the United States and overeager regulators abroad. But Mark Zuckerberg is the fifth-wealthiest man on Earth. He can afford to stand up for himself.
And we can’t afford for him not to.
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October 30, 2021 at 06:33PM
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Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook fight is really about silencing right-wing voices - New York Post
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