As the eye-opening documentary The Social Dilemma reveals, social-media publishers such as Facebook have perfected the art of making their psy-op manipulation into a sort of magic trick.
For its latest slight of hand, the Big Tech giant pulled a bait-and-switch over the Jan. 6 uprising at the US Capitol by finally appearing to admit guilt in a recent internal report.
Spoiler alert: The goal is finding a way to justify even more partisan censorship while pushing a falsely-framed narrative about the pro-Trump demonstration.
According to an article from the far-left clickbait site BuzzFeed, Facebook released an internal report in early April titled “Stop the Steal and Patriot Party: The Growth and Mitigation of an Adversarial Harmful Movement.”
In it, the company accepted responsibility for the role it played in helping conservative political dissidents communicate and coordinate their ‘siege’ on the Capitol.
Facebook’s report might seem, at first glance, to be another false olive-branch—a bid to show solidarity with truth-seekers who demand an honest and transparent account of what happened, even if it creates negative optics for the company.
But instead, Facebook’s supposed mea culpa is little more than a way to perpetuate a dying narrative and distract from its greater offenses of censorship and election-meddling.
FALSE EQUIVALENCY
Following a recent acknowledgement by the Washington, DC, medical examiner that Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick died of natural causes, the Left’s fraudulent claims about the so-called insurrection have continued to unravel.
Only one person was killed as a result of the day’s actions: Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt. However, the Justice Department, without releasing the name of her killer, has determined that there was no basis for criminal charges.
Nonetheless, hundreds of pro-MAGA participants remain indefinitely detained on federal charges for the simple act of entering a public building that elitist House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., described as a “temple to democracy.”
Those facts, alone, expose the massive double-standard involving the use of deadly force by law enforcement and the inconsistent reaction to acts of left-wing political violence, which have gone widely ignored.
Facebook’s anti-conservative censorship—which began incrementally before exploding in the lead-up to the Nov. 3 election—has also been a source of hypocrisy.
Notably, it has aggressively suppressed information about vote fraud efforts that were largely bankrolled by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
But just like its algorithms regulate the flow of content to keep consumers addicted to scrolling, Facebook’s political operatives continuously work the levers of their partisan manipulation to throw critics off-balance.
By taking meetings with conservatives and nominally censoring extremist left-wing groups like the Nation of Islam, Zuckerberg afforded himself enough plausible deniability about the grand-scale suppression of right-wing viewpoints for Democrats to engage in false-equivalent parlor games of whataboutism.
BS.
Zuckerberg knew.
He actively conspired with Trump on the daily… atleast in 2020.
— Stevo2346 (@stevo2346) April 22, 2021
FROM BLAME TO SHAME
In the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 6 uprising, the leftist echo-chamber hyped the event as a treasonous mutiny of “white supremacists” and right-wing “domestic terrorists.”
Facebook rushed to join in the scapegoating of conservative platforms like Parler—despite evidence that posts to its own network vastly outnumbered those to the free-speech-oriented upstart.
During testimony before the US House of Representatives, Zuckerberg claimed that Facebook had done its best “to secure the integrity of the election” and had “made our services inhospitable to those who might do harm.”
But a week later, Facebook’s internal report—issued by a company task-force studying “harmful networks”—seemed to contradict the billionaire wunderkind.
Facebook blamed itself for the spread of a private group called “Stop the Steal” that appeared immediately after the Nov. 3 election
Shockingly, Facebook failed to ban the group until it had grown to more than 300,000 people, with a million others waiting to be admitted.
To the untrained eye, the group’s popularity might seem a repudiation from a large swath of conservative Facebook users about the gaslighting that the company had helped to promote.
But for leftists it amounted to a massive red flag, revealing in hindsight that the pro-Trump “deplorables” should have been prevented from ever becoming so influential in the first place.
“Hindsight is 20/20, at the time, it was very difficult to know whether what we were seeing was a coordinated effort to delegitimize the election, or whether it was free expression by users who were afraid and confused and deserved our empathy,” said the report.
“But hindsight being 20/20 makes it all the more important to look back to learn what we can about the growth of the election delegitimizing movements that grew, spread conspiracy, and helped incite the Capitol insurrection.”
PRESTO CHANGE-O
Facebook’s report somehow was leaked to BuzzFeed, the same website notorious for having published the debunked “Steele Dossier” to undermine and delegitimize then-president-elect Donald Trump after the 2016 election.
BuzzFeed breathlessly noted that—based on the subjective interpretations of Facebook’s internal task force—the “Stop the Steal” group contained far more than the average number of slurs, hateful statements, QAnon references and other verboten anathema that should never see the light of day in a free country.
A table in the report illustrates how much hate existed in Stop the Steal groups compared to other political and social issue groups. 0.89% of civic groups on FB had at least 5 pieces of content deemed “violence and incitement.” Nearly 43% of StS groups showed the same behavior pic.twitter.com/gCAMp53bwb
— Craig Silverman (@CraigSilverman) April 22, 2021
To confirm its own biases, the article cited a Harvard analyst, Joan Donovan, whose personal opinions masquerading as expertise made Buzzfeed’s own editorializing seem downright moderate.
Donovan bizarrely concluded that Facebook’s failure to promptly censor the massive group of political dissenters who were concerned about a stolen election offered proof positive that Facebook was itself a threat to democracy.
“This shows the company is anti-democratic at the very least,” she claimed, “and at the very worst, it shows that they know the risks, and they know the harm that can be caused and they are not willing to do anything significant to stop it from happening again.”
Now that the gauntlet has been thrown (and run several times through the spin cycle of left-wing anti-logic), clearly Facebook’s moral imperative is to respond by showing the Harvard and Buzzfeed naysayers that it is up to the challenge.
Despite its past failure to preempt the spread of dangerous anti-left viewpoints, the company pledged to do better next time at censoring people who criticized the very same corrupt actions with which Facebook’s CEO—and many of the company’s employees—were deeply involved.
“As we’ve said previously, we still saw problematic content on our platform during this period and we know that we didn’t catch everything,” Facebook said in a statement.
“This is not a definitive report,” it added. “It’s a product of one of many teams who are continuing to study what happened so we can continue improving our content moderation.”
A Facebook spox said the company took a number of steps to limit content that sought to delegitimize the election including the suspension of Trump’s account, labeling candidates’ post with vote-counting information after Trump prematurely declared victory, etc. pic.twitter.com/AtxeJAMSQ1
— Craig Silverman (@CraigSilverman) April 22, 2021
