The Wrong Case against Facebook

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Wednesday, October 06, 2021

 

It’s really not hard to envision that Frances Haugen, the “Facebook Whistleblower,” is going to get the Hollywood treatment soon. She has already provided the origin story. She saw a friend get radicalized by content online. This is meant to give the story a personal drama. Even a relatable one — everyone seems to have someone in his life who shares wild conspiracy theories he got from social-media platforms.

 

But the only question is whether journalists between now and then will uncover whether she specifically sought out a job on Facebook’s misinformation because of her preexisting political commitments. According to a report on The Daily Wire (more on them in a minute), Haugen is a donor to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She’s working with the press firm that was formerly run by current White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki.

 

She seems to have spent almost her entire time at Facebook preparing for and building towards this grand reveal. From The Daily Wire’s report:

 

Haugen’s case has some similarities to the Ukraine/impeachment case. She carefully fed internal Facebook documents to the Wall Street Journal, working with Zaid and his law partners John Tye, a former Obama State Department official, and Andrew Bakaj, who worked for Democratic senators including Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

 

And it’s not hard to know that Democrats wanted to take down Facebook. Facebook was blamed for Brexit and for Donald Trump’s election. “We can have democracy — or we can have social networks that allow the spread of weaponized disinformation about our elections,” raged Hillary Clinton after her loss.

 

You may recall that after those years, there was a similar blitz-media rollout on the evils of Cambridge Analytica, a conservative outfit that did research on populist voters across Facebook related to both Brexit and Donald Trump. Cambridge Analytica used the same exact tools that the Obama campaign had pioneered in 2012, but used them less widely, less invasively, and less effectively than the Obama 2012 campaign did. When Obama won, Facebook’s role was hailed. Digital masterminds were doing the great work of leading us all to the sunlit uplands of progressive utopia.

 

When Hillary lost, and Brexit happened, it became obvious that the age of social-media users had climbed up and had begun to reflect a given country’s population more accurately. Precisely because social media were freer of the supervisory intervention of mainstream-media institutions, which are dominated by liberals, it seemed in some way to favor conservatives. Outlets such as The Daily Wire, one of the few conservative news outlets aggressively pursuing a Facebook-led growth strategy, dominate the top-ten story feeds on the site.

 

Angela Merkel, Barack Obama, and almost the whole establishment came down hard on Mark Zuckerberg. The panic about misinformation was launched. And where did it lead? It led to years of the mainstream media pumping misinformation about Russian servers and Russian real-estate deals into circulation. And then it led to social-media companies censoring, restricting, and trying to bury the very true stories around Hunter Biden’s laptop.

 

It led to Facebook’s extraordinary intervention into the Irish abortion referendum. After the government and most of the mainstream press had lined up for repeal of constitutional provisions restricting abortion, the campaign for retaining those views depended entirely on social media. On the very day of their first big ad buy, Facebook announced that there was a foreign threat to the integrity of the Irish referendum and suspended all online advertising — disproportionately affecting the pro-life campaign. No one has since explained what that foreign threat was. Really, it was Facebook itself.

 

Left-leaning critics of Facebook — Haugen very much included — have a very difficult time distinguishing the behavior of conservatives on Facebook from the effect of Facebook’s design on conservative belief. That is, for the Left, Facebook and other social-media platforms are a portal through which they can observe all the unapproved things right-leaning voters say to each other. Their vain wish is that reliable progressive liars like Dan Rather can be put back in charge of the information space. That is why there is a rolling campaign — from Cambridge Analytica to “the Facebook whistleblower” — to get social-media companies more on board with progressive messaging.

 

In my view, Facebook and other giants do pose real threats to democratic self-government, to national sovereignty, and to the mental health and privacy of their users. These need to be sorted out very quickly. But don’t fall for this ongoing whistleblower operation. The failure of Facebook to stop conservatives and populists from talking with one another, and the failure to sufficiently propagandize and intervene in national debates, is not the problem with Facebook.