As Facebook drowns in privacy scandals censorship, investigations, conservatives are being urged to avoid working with the platform.
Wall Street Journal’s columnist Peggy Noonan wrote that Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg were using conservatives as “pawns.” In an June 6 column that eviscerated Zuckerberg as a “prince in his castle,” Noonan called for Facebook to be broken up. She said, “Break them up. Break them in two, in three; regulate them.”
She expressed frustration with conservatives who had worked with Facebook in the past. She quoted a Wired piece about the 2016 meeting between noted conservative figures and Facebook, which said, “conservatives failed to unify in a way that was threatening or coherent.”
Her own story about the meeting explained how she was invited as a “conservative activist.” When she replied that she was a columnist, she was told “That wouldn’t do.” In the summer of 2018, she was consulted again by Zuckerberg, who invited her to a meeting of conservatives in his own home. Noonan refused, saying that she found Zuckerberg to be an “imperious twerp.”
Noonan wanted conservatives and members of the GOP to start doing the same. She urged people not to take the massive lobbying checks offered by Big Tech giants like Facebook and Google. She wrote a call to “do something.”
Otherwise, she lamented, Republicans will be used by these tech giants to keep going.
