By Kevin D. Williamson
Saturday, October 30, 2021
Everyone knows who won the 2016 presidential election,
but do you know who lost?
Mark Zuckerberg.
The “Facebook Papers” campaign that currently is being
fought on every front from The Associated Press to Congress is not just about
online safety or social justice — it is about beating Facebook into submission
before the next election in order to push the platform into behaving more like
Twitter or YouTube, i.e., to take Facebook from a place that is
mildly hostile to conservatives to one that is extremely hostile to
conservatives.
Facebook has a split personality. Right-leaning
entertainers such as Dan Bongino may thrive on the platform, but when something
comes along that actually threatens Democratic interests — say, a New York Post
story about Hunter Biden’s financial shenanigans — then Facebook goes to
extraordinary lengths to quash that content.
Facebook is especially sensitive around Election Day. And
that is because the war on Facebook is a direct outgrowth of the angst and
wailing and denial that followed Donald Trump’s electoral win in 2016 — an
outcome that was blamed, preposterously, on your elderly aunt’s favorite
social-media platform.
Much like Republicans in 2020, Democrats in 2016 simply
could not accept that their incompetent and unlovable candidate had been
whipped in a fair fight by a challenger who seemed to them entirely unfit for
the office. This wasn’t the Democrats’ first foray into election kookery: They
insisted for the whole of George W. Bush’s presidency that he was
illegitimately installed in the office.
But there was no Facebook to blame back in 2000, when
Zuckerberg was a sophomore in high school.
Today, the Democrats blame misinformation and fake news
every time they suffer a setback. If Hillary Clinton had campaigned a little
harder in the swing states, we would probably think about the Russian bots and
partisan fake-newsers on Facebook the same way we think about the Nigerian
finance ministers who are always e-mailing us with an unbelievable financial
opportunity: just one more species of nonsense on an Internet that is full of
it.
The so-called Facebook Papers do not, in fact, offer much
of an indictment of the company. The notional complaints are that Facebook is
not as assertive in screening and policing the approximately 5 billion pieces
of content that are posted there as its critics think it should be, that it is
not as good about screening content written in Marathi or Amharic as it is
posts in English, and that it is not sufficiently deferential to the demands of
its internal “woke” faction. That’s a whole lot of nothing.
Critics expect us to be shocked that Facebook’s popular
Instagram app is about as good at warping teenaged girls’ perceptions as Cosmo
and the Kardashians are, and they want us to blame Facebook for awful things
such as political violence in India and fake news leading up to US elections.
But these lamentable situations predate Facebook by
generations: Indians massacred as many as 17,000 of their Sikh neighbors in
1984, when their main tools of political organization were telephones and
loudspeakers, and then killed another 2,000 of their neighbors in a dispute
about a 460-year-old mosque in 1992. Americans were circulating conspiracy
theories on fax machines a generation ago, and fake news was a problem in 18th
century elections. That isn’t a Facebook problem — that’s a people problem.
Mark Zuckerberg of Philips Exeter, Harvard, and Silicon
Valley is silently accused of being a traitor to his class, giving an
unnecessary voice to those bumptious hinterlanders “Saturday Night Live” likes
to sneer at as “Walmart shoppers.” Progressives have controlled entities such
as The New York Times, The Association Press and National Public Radio for so
long that they believe they are entitled to act as the national umpires of what
is sayable and unsayable, thinkable and unthinkable.
Bullying Facebook corporate and Zuckerberg personally is
only a natural extension of Democratic political strategy. We should see it for
what it is.
Zuckerberg may have thought he could buy himself some
friends by giving $400 million to help local election offices adapt to the
COVID-19 epidemic. But what the Democrats want from Zuckerberg and Facebook
isn’t politically neutral do-goodism. The Democrats want to control the
conversation, period.
Facebook has real problems, including a moribund
geriatric user base in the United States and overeager regulators abroad. But
Mark Zuckerberg is the fifth-wealthiest man on Earth. He can afford to stand up
for himself.
And we can’t afford for him not to.
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