Facebook
June 18, 2020 — John Hinderaker
That is an evergreen headline. Here are a couple of instances from today’s news. First, Facebook has pulled Trump campaign ads under its “organized hate” policy. Sounds serious, right? No: the Trump ads were anti-Antifa, and, since Antifa is an organized hate group, you might think Facebook would approve of them. Just kidding. Still, what was the problem? The Trump campaign ads included a red inverted triangle. A Trump campaign
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May 28, 2020 — John Hinderaker
Today President Trump signed an executive order intended to address the problem of liberal bias in the major social media platforms. Reporting on the order has generally been poor. This is some of what it actually says, after a long preamble: Sec. 2. Protections Against Online Censorship. (a) It is the policy of the United States to foster clear ground rules promoting free and open debate on the internet. Prominent
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August 20, 2019 — John Hinderaker
Last year, Facebook hired former senator Jon Kyl and lawyers from Covington and Burling, a prominent D.C. law firm, to look into allegations of bias against conservatives. The Kyl group released its first report today. My impression of the report is that it does a pretty good job of summarizing conservatives’ concerns about the Facebook platform. For example: Hate Organization Designations: Facebook prohibits use of the platform by “terrorist groups
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July 2, 2019 — John Hinderaker
Facebook has issued a second Progress Report on its ongoing “Civil Rights Audit.” The report has special reference to the 2020 election and, to put it mildly, it does not inspire confidence. Facebook’s “civil rights” initiative is based on “interviews with over 90 civil rights organizations.” Throughout the current report, the “civil rights community” is referred to as though it were monolithic and authoritative. I am afraid there is a
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March 31, 2019 — John Hinderaker
In an op-ed in the Washington Post, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg called on governments to increase regulation of internet speech. It is easy to understand why Zuckerberg wants governments to tell Facebook what to do. Following regulations will insulate Facebook against liability, and the free speech controversies of recent years have been an unwelcome distraction from Facebook’s remarkably successful business model. Zuckerberg wants government action “in four areas: harmful content,
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March 11, 2019 — John Hinderaker
ZeroHedge is one of the most popular news sites on the internet. Its traffic is, I believe, more than ours. Yet it has been banned by Facebook, the great bluenose of our time: Over the weekend, we were surprised to learn that some readers were prevented by Facebook when attempting to share Zero Hedge articles. Subsequently it emerged that virtually every attempt to share or merely mention an article, including
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December 28, 2018 — John Hinderaker
The anti-conservative bias exhibited by Silicon Valley’s tech giants and its impact on our cultural and political life is a huge topic that we have addressed many times. This post will just note a few recent developments. Tyler O’Neil reports on Facebook’s consideration of dueling bias claims: On Tuesday, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg announced a few results from the “civil rights” audit led by former ACLU lawyer Laura Murphy. That
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November 19, 2018 — John Hinderaker
Our friend Glenn Reynolds has an op-ed in USA Today in which he urges antitrust enforcement actions against the dominant tech firms: “Donald Trump must bust Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google monopolies like Teddy Roosevelt.” Roosevelt built a strong reputation by going after the trusts, huge combinations that placed control of entire industries in the hands of one or a few men. He broke up John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, the
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September 13, 2018 — John Hinderaker
I wrote last night about the leaked Google video that confirms, once and for all, that Google is an arm of the Democratic Party. Now, word emerges that the Department of Justice has invited 24 state attorneys general to meet for the purpose of discussing possible antitrust actions against the dominant technology platforms: On Thursday, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that nearly half of the state attorneys general would
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September 7, 2018 — John Hinderaker
The Senate Intelligence Committee held a hearing on Wednesday, to which representatives of Google, Facebook and Twitter were invited. Google declined to attend, perhaps because its representative would have been questioned about why Google privileges the governments of Russia and China over that of the United States. Top executives of Facebook and Twitter–Sheryl Sandberg and Jack Dorsey–did show up. Tom Cotton noted Google’s empty chair while questioning Sandberg and Dorsey
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August 23, 2018 — John Hinderaker
As I wrote here, the Left is outsourcing censorship of the internet to the tech companies of Silicon Valley, all of which are happily–if you are a leftist–run by liberals. What the government can’t do, on account of the First Amendment, private companies like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube can do with impunity. Increasingly, conservatives are persona non grata on social media platforms. The latest instance is Salena Zito, one of
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August 17, 2018 — John Hinderaker
Liberals control every newspaper in America, as far as I know, except the Manchester Union Leader. They control CBS, ABC, NBC and every cable network except Fox News. They control what is left of the news magazines, and pretty much every other magazine, too. Only talk radio and the pesky internet lie outside their grasp, so that is where they seek to impose censorship. But they have a problem: the
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August 7, 2018 — John Hinderaker
In a brief post, John Hayward makes several critical points about the current media landscape: Blogs shattered the Old Media monopoly during the 2004 election. We remember it well. At the time, it seemed like the dawn of a new age. Social media became an instrument to restore the power of the guild. As websites grew dependent on a few big social platforms for clicks, a leash that could tame
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August 5, 2018 — John Hinderaker
The Left’s attack on free speech has many fronts, but two of the most important are Twitter and Facebook, simply because a large portion of political discussion, involving many millions of Americans, takes place on those platforms. As I noted here, our First Amendment gives powerful legal protection to political debate–protection that for now, at least, is acknowledged even by the four Democratic Party Supreme Court justices. (See, e.g., Matal
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July 31, 2018 — John Hinderaker
Facebook announced today that it has removed 32 “bad actors” from its platform: Today we removed 32 Pages and accounts from Facebook and Instagram because they were involved in coordinated inauthentic behavior. This kind of behavior is not allowed on Facebook because we don’t want people or organizations creating networks of accounts to mislead others about who they are, or what they’re doing. We’re still in the very early stages
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July 27, 2018 — John Hinderaker
The fact that Facebook and Twitter are the platforms on which political discussion largely takes place, and probably will remain such for the foreseeable future, given the network effects that entrench them, is deeply troubling. Both companies are run by liberals, and free speech is under attack on both platforms. This story in Entertainment Weekly is a chilling reminder of how little regard liberals–even liberal reporters!–have for free speech: Facebook
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May 2, 2018 — John Hinderaker
Buzzfeed reports that Facebook is implementing a system to promote or demote news sources based on “trustworthiness”: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Tuesday that the company has already begun to implement a system that ranks news organizations based on trustworthiness, and promotes or suppresses its content based on that metric. We all know what that means. Zuckerberg said the company has gathered data on how consumers perceive news brands by
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