Facebook Is a Right-Wing Company, Part One Million

https://newrepublic.com/article/156055/facebook-right-wing-company-part-one-million

By ALEX SHEPHARD
December 18, 2019

Excerpt:

Then, in October, Facebook launched a partnership with a number of news outlets. Facebook had become synonymous with the “fake news” problem, and its response was to empower legitimate outlets by launching Facebook News, a tab on its mobile app. But one of Facebook’s new partners was Breitbart, the alt-right hub that regularly publishes racist stories. As The Verge’s Casey Newton noted at the time, “Breitbart was included in the tab precisely for ideological reasons.… Certainly no one at Facebook seems to be suggesting that Breitbart is a reliable producer of high-quality journalism—the argument seems to be rather that it would be poor form to exclude them just because they once (for example) tagged relevant stories with the label ‘black crime.’”

Meanwhile, Zuckerberg’s public rhetoric has gotten more MAGA. He now makes a nationalistic argument on behalf of Facebook: Empower us, or cede ground to China. Defending the company’s digital currency, Libra, before Congress this summer, Zuckerberg said, “I believe that if America does not lead innovation in the digital currency and payments area, others will. If we fail to act, we could soon see a digital currency controlled by others whose values are dramatically different.”


As it happens, Thiel has been one of Silicon Valley’s leading anti-China voices, arguing in August that Google was helping the country “gain an intelligence advantage” and “penetrate defenses in the relatively new theater of cyberwarfare.”

In October, Zuckerberg delivered a new manifesto for Facebook. While he continued to claim the company was about bringing people together, he also made a free-speech absolutist case in defense of his life’s work. “I am here today because I believe we must continue to stand for free expression,” he told an audience at Georgetown University. Facebook, in this telling, could not police its platform out of principle. It could not rid itself of hate speech and manipulative political advertisements aimed at promoting right-wing candidates, even if it wanted to. “I don’t think it’s right for a private company to censor politicians in a democracy,” he said.

For years, Facebook’s public relations team has tried to present Mark Zuckerberg not as the ruthless billionaire he is, but as a compassionate and curious young man seeking to understand the world around him. That has changed over the past year and a half. Facebook has, as many have noted, always been a covertly right-wing company, “hostage to conservative ideas about economics and speech,” as Jacob Silverman wrote in The Baffler. Thanks to Thiel’s influence, it has increasingly become an overtly right-wing one.