If Facebook discriminated against conservative-friendly news items, mused The New Republic’s Brian Beutler in a Friday article, it almost certainly had good reason to do so, given the abundance of nonsense that right-wingers unleash on the Web.
“The differences between mainstream and liberal political content on the one hand, and conservative content on the other, [are] critical,” wrote Beutler. “Facebook reviewers tasked with ‘disregard[ing] junk…hoaxes or subjects with insufficient sources’ are going to ensnare more climate-change denialism, more birther stories, more racist Breitbart agitprop than anything comparably dubious that comes out of the liberal internet. And those dubious stories will come not just from fringe sites or content farms, but from prestige outlets of the online right.”
Beutler hinted that when conservatives claim that an institution has treated them unfairly, they’re also consciously promoting the larger righty cause: “Mythmaking around both the IRS and Facebook flaps summons more outrage, sharpens a sense of victimization, and thus creates a larger appetite for right-wing electioneering groups and conspiracy theories. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle of bullshit.”
From Beutler’s piece (bolding added):
The IRS [was] tasked with determining the validity of claims to non-profit status, but lacking the proper resources to do it or clear guidance on how…The agency thus used watchwords like “tea party” and “progressive” to, in its words, triage the workload.
For the purposes of ginning up voters, that story is much less useful than one in which a liberal agency leader masterminded a sabotage campaign against patriotic conservatives trying to rescue the country from Obama. And so the IRS scandal was born…
At a glance, the IRS and Facebook “scandals” bear little resemblance to one another—but the imperative both organizations face to sort truth from fiction creates a key similarity…
Much like the IRS, inundated with non-profit status applications from groups that by all appearances were created for electioneering purposes, Facebook is a vast dumping ground for viral political content…
Thus, like the IRS, Facebook needs to triage. And here the differences between mainstream and liberal political content on the one hand, and conservative content on the other, become critical. Facebook reviewers tasked with “disregard[ing] junk…hoaxes or subjects with insufficient sources” are going to ensnare more climate-change denialism, more birther stories, more racist Breitbart agitprop than anything comparably dubious that comes out of the liberal internet. And those dubious stories will come not just from fringe sites or content farms, but from prestige outlets of the online right. Presumably liberal hoaxes and inaccurate liberal news are also bumped from trending topics…yet among the presumably liberal ranks of Facebook workers, this is probably seen not as suppression, but as obligatory empiricism and social responsibility…
…Mythmaking around both the IRS and Facebook flaps summons more outrage, sharpens a sense of victimization, and thus creates a larger appetite for right-wing electioneering groups and conspiracy theories. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle of bullshit.
