https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/a...-pretend-big-tech-biased-against-them/594916/
Cruz knows that conservatives need Facebook and Google and that they benefit greatly from the algorithmic amplification that occurs in both systems. Trump’s 2020 campaign manager is Brad Parscale, who ran digital operations for the president’s successful 2016 campaign. Parscale declared that his mastery of Facebook for advertising, amplifying pro-Trump videos and memes, and fundraising won the 2016 election.
Scholarship supports this conclusion. As the sociologist Jen Schradie demonstrates in great detail in her new book, The Revolution That Wasn’t: How Digital Activism Favors Conservatives, Facebook and Google work better for top-down, well-funded, disciplined, directed movements. Those adjectives tend to describe conservative groups more than liberal or leftist groups in the United States. In our current media ecosystem, right-wing sources of news and propaganda spread much further and faster than liberal or neutral sources do, according to a rigorous quantitative study of communication-network patternsby Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. Internet platforms are demonstrably not silencing conservative ideas. If anything, the opposite is true.
First, conservatives are working the refs. If conservatives put media executives on their heels, constantly defending themselves or excusing themselves or apologizing for misunderstandings, then these companies are likely to bend toward conservatives out of fear or just exhaustion. This strategy has succeeded before. The liberal-media critic Eric Alterman has argued that such campaigns in the 1990s and early 2000s resulted in mainstream outlets such as The New York Times pushing unjustified right-wing causes like the Whitewater investigation and the invasion of Iraq.
Working the refs is still effective. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Jack Dorsey of Twitter are not wise enough to understand what’s happening. So both Facebook and Twitter have allowed themselves to be worked. Platforms do make some intentional decisions to moderate the content that appears on their websites. But Facebook, Twitter, and Google staff try to do so based on principles and standards that they agonize over. Calls to violence or gender-based harassment should not be considered expressions of political ideology. More often than not, these companies under-filter hate speech because they have such strong concern for free speech. Far from rushing to suspend even conspiracy slingers and hate-mongers such as Alex Jones and Milo Yiannopoulos, executives at Facebook and Twitter hemmed and hawed for years about whether to enforce their own terms of service.
Surely Cruz and Hawley don’t mean to make Alex Jones’s cause their cause, right? If they did, they’d be equating American conservatism with ethno-nationalist trolling and loony fantasies such as Pizzagate.
The campaign to convince people that the problem with Facebook and Google is that they lean left has a second, more dangerous effect. Fundamentally, it undermines seriousness—that is, it makes any productive discussion impossible.
That is the real story of Facebook and Google and their effects on our collective minds. We have been rendered unable to take serious things seriously. One reason we can’t face that horrible conclusion is that—well, we can’t take serious things seriously. Cruz, Hawley, and Trump benefit greatly from that vicious circle in the short term, but democracy and the pursuit of a decent society suffer greatly over time.
Cruz knows that conservatives need Facebook and Google and that they benefit greatly from the algorithmic amplification that occurs in both systems. Trump’s 2020 campaign manager is Brad Parscale, who ran digital operations for the president’s successful 2016 campaign. Parscale declared that his mastery of Facebook for advertising, amplifying pro-Trump videos and memes, and fundraising won the 2016 election.
Scholarship supports this conclusion. As the sociologist Jen Schradie demonstrates in great detail in her new book, The Revolution That Wasn’t: How Digital Activism Favors Conservatives, Facebook and Google work better for top-down, well-funded, disciplined, directed movements. Those adjectives tend to describe conservative groups more than liberal or leftist groups in the United States. In our current media ecosystem, right-wing sources of news and propaganda spread much further and faster than liberal or neutral sources do, according to a rigorous quantitative study of communication-network patternsby Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. Internet platforms are demonstrably not silencing conservative ideas. If anything, the opposite is true.
First, conservatives are working the refs. If conservatives put media executives on their heels, constantly defending themselves or excusing themselves or apologizing for misunderstandings, then these companies are likely to bend toward conservatives out of fear or just exhaustion. This strategy has succeeded before. The liberal-media critic Eric Alterman has argued that such campaigns in the 1990s and early 2000s resulted in mainstream outlets such as The New York Times pushing unjustified right-wing causes like the Whitewater investigation and the invasion of Iraq.
Working the refs is still effective. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Jack Dorsey of Twitter are not wise enough to understand what’s happening. So both Facebook and Twitter have allowed themselves to be worked. Platforms do make some intentional decisions to moderate the content that appears on their websites. But Facebook, Twitter, and Google staff try to do so based on principles and standards that they agonize over. Calls to violence or gender-based harassment should not be considered expressions of political ideology. More often than not, these companies under-filter hate speech because they have such strong concern for free speech. Far from rushing to suspend even conspiracy slingers and hate-mongers such as Alex Jones and Milo Yiannopoulos, executives at Facebook and Twitter hemmed and hawed for years about whether to enforce their own terms of service.
Surely Cruz and Hawley don’t mean to make Alex Jones’s cause their cause, right? If they did, they’d be equating American conservatism with ethno-nationalist trolling and loony fantasies such as Pizzagate.
The campaign to convince people that the problem with Facebook and Google is that they lean left has a second, more dangerous effect. Fundamentally, it undermines seriousness—that is, it makes any productive discussion impossible.
That is the real story of Facebook and Google and their effects on our collective minds. We have been rendered unable to take serious things seriously. One reason we can’t face that horrible conclusion is that—well, we can’t take serious things seriously. Cruz, Hawley, and Trump benefit greatly from that vicious circle in the short term, but democracy and the pursuit of a decent society suffer greatly over time.
