On Thursday, Oct. 11, with just a month to go before the midterm elections, Facebook announced that they had purged around 800 pages and accounts tied to alternative media sources due to their “inauthentic behavior,” mostly related to spam and click-bait, which Facebook said was against their user guidelines.
While the initial storm has died down, there is still a great deal of anxiety, especially on the right side of the political spectrum, that Silicon Valley has it out for them given that “alternative media” is often a codeword for “conservative media.”
The perception that conservatives are being “censored” by mainstream media outlets has existed for quite a while and largely owes its existence to the fact that an overwhelming majority of both print and television journalists working for the national news agencies identify as left-leaning.
In 2016, when the tech news website Gizmodo published a scoop on Facebook’s editors, who were said to routinely filter right-leaning content out of the favored algorithms on their platform, it fueled a more acute suspicion that Facebook is actively curating the intellectual discourse on their site to the disadvantage of conservatives.
Meanwhile, other related scandals in the tech world have not done the internet moguls any favors in the public relations department. Google, the parent company of YouTube, came under fire for their increasingly strict approach to policing the site’s ad monetization system.
This was due in large part to a concerted, and in this writer’s opinion contrived, uproar from advertisers like Coca-Cola about their ads being played alongside “radical” or “alt-right” content.
While YouTube rarely outright removes content, they often place videos from fringe political commentators into “restricted mode,” which makes them very hard to access. In addition, demonetization is a common threat for even timid conservatives and some liberals, with a prime example being when they stripped an episode of “The Rubin Report”, which featured conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, of its ability to make ad revenue.
Further complicating things, Twitter has also been involved in similar activity. Various conservatives or non-progressive liberal personalities have complained of being “shadowbanned” by Twitter, and the social media company was involved in a large purge of their userbase, over the summer, which they claimed to be bots and fake accounts.
Perhaps the most stark example of this behavior was the decision by YouTube, Facebook, Apple Podcast and Spotify to join forces in removing Alex Jones’ program “Info Wars” from their sites simultaneously, opening up the companies involved to charges of a politically-motivated hit-job.
While the optics are not great for ‘Big Tech’, the damage is not so severe as many on the right make it out to be. Right-wing media on Facebook still dwarfs comparable presence by avowed left-wing outlets, with sources like Breitbart and The Daily Wire boasting enormous Facebook audiences.
Still, with an industry that is solidly blue, in my estimation, Facebook and their competitors are likely trying what they can get away with and possibly attempting to draw conservatives into wasting their energy with overtrumped charges of censorship ahead of a highly-contested midterm.
