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Substituting Censorship and Lies for Debate

Eight years of Progressive control of both the White House and the national agenda resulted in economic stagnation, a sharply reduced defense environment, a doubling of debt, and deteriorated race relations.  Despite those poor results, hard-core leftists have managed to increase their influence.

Campaigning on the issues is not a winning tactic for an increasingly Progressive-dominated party. Instead, they and their supporters have, with disturbing frequency, adopted a strategy that combines suppression of alternative ideas, along with personal and inaccurate attacks on both rival politicians and anyone else who opposes their perspectives. Character assassination targets extend far beyond President Trump.

Florida GOP gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis and Red Sox baseball star J.D. Martinez provide telling examples.  DeSantis, emphasizing the importance of the issues in his state, urged voters not to “monkey it up.”  According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the similar phrase “monkey around” is defined as “to do things that are not useful or serious: to waste time.”

But DeSantis’s opponents decided that the well-known and oft-use phrase was a racial slur. (His opponent is black.) It was a great way to avoid a discussion of the reality that the radical views expressed by hard-left candidate Andrew Gillum can be readily compared to those which have recently wrecked Venezuela and previously destroyed other nations both politically and economically, and have repeatedly been demonstrated to be a disaster wherever implemented.

An even more startling falsehood was seen in the thoroughly false characterization of the remarks about gun control uttered by Red Sox player J.D. Martinez, an advocate of Second Amendment rights.

Martinez noted, correctly, that the nightmare regime of Adolf Hitler moved to disarm the German population to eliminate the potential of resistance to his unprecedented assault on human rights. The Second Amendment is a target of the Left, but rather than engage in an honest dialogue, they chose to falsely portray Martinez as quoting Hitler in an admiring manner.

Beyond character assassination, suppression of alternative views has become a key tactic.

The moves by Facebook and Google to censor out non-leftist perspectives has increasingly enraged critics, including President Trump.  Google has recently demonstrated its intense progressive leanings by refusing to work with the U.S. Government on defense-related issues, while at the same time cooperating with the Beijing regime in its suppression of dissident views.
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Even some Facebook staff have rebelled against this. According to a Daily Mail report Facebook engineer Brian Amerige has described the company’s “political intolerance” and the threats against employees who don’t go along with leftist ideology.

Robert Epstein, writing in U.S. News, states that “Google, Inc., isn’t just the world’s biggest purveyor of information; it is also the world’s biggest censor.  The company maintains at least nine different blacklists that impact our lives, generally without input or authority from any outside advisory group, industry association or government agency. Google is not the only company suppressing content on the internet. Reddit has frequently been accused of banning postings on specific topics, and a recent report suggests that Facebook has been deleting conservative news stories from its newsfeed, a practice that might have a significant effect on public opinion – even on voting. Google, though, is currently the biggest bully on the block.”

A study by PJ media’s Paula Bolyard found that, when searching the term “Trump” on Google, “Not a single right-leaning site appeared on the first page of search results. But it got much, much worse when I analyzed the first 100 items that Google returned in a search for news on ‘Trump.’ CNN, by a wide margin, appeared most frequently, with nearly twice as many results returned as the second-place finisher, The Washington Post. Other left-leaning outlets also fared well, including NBC, CNBC, The Atlantic, and Politico.”

Opportunities for debate on substantive issues have been intentionally sabotaged by Progressives. A National Review article noted that “global-warming public intellectuals have warned the media that if they allow skeptics to have a voice in stories, they will boycott giving comment…no one is obliged to provide them with a platform, much less to appear alongside them to give the misleading impression that there is something substantive to debate.”  This, of course, is comparatively mild compared to the move by Loretta Lynch, while serving as U.S. Attorney General, to refer to the FBI for criminal prosecution consideration those who disagreed with Barack Obama’s views on climate change.

The direction is turning into even more worrisome areas. Despite the overwhelmingly favorable image of leftist candidates portrayed by the media, the mere threat of objective reporting is considered unacceptable by Progressives. New York City’s Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, the “Democrat-Socialist” candidate for Congress, moved to ban reporters from her townhall meetings.

The Miami Herald reports that a Democrat candidate for State Senate, Daphne Campbell, “ a politician beset by scandals over the years,” called 911 when a reporter sought to question her. According to the Herald, “It wasn’t the first time Campbell called the cops on a reporter. In May, she also called police on the publisher of RISE NEWS outside a Miami Shores Village Council meeting.”

Illustration: Pixabay

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Facebook Accused of Biased News Coverage

On May 4, the New York Analysis of Policy and Government questioned whether popular social media sites tilted their news coverage in favor of left wing points of view. We worried that attempts to expand into the lucrative Chinese market, for example, by Facebook would enhance that problem.

On May 10, U.S. Senator John Thune (R-S.D.), chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, asked Facebook Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to answer questions following reports that company employees actively suppressed news stories on topics of interest to politically conservative users of the social media platform.

A statement by the Committee noted:

“Facebook must answer these serious allegations and hold those responsible to account if there has been political bias in the dissemination of trending news,’ said Thune on sending the letter. ‘Any attempt by a neutral and inclusive social media platform to censor or manipulate political discussion is an abuse of trust and inconsistent with the values of an open Internet.’

“On May 9, a story in Gizmodo reported allegations by several former unnamed Facebook employees that the company routinely worked to suppress conservative viewpoints on the social network and artificially highlighted other news stories even when objective metrics did not indicate they were ‘trending.”

Thune’s letter asks Zuckerberg to provide answers to the following questions no later than May 24:

“1)    Please describe Facebook’s organizational structure for the Trending Topics feature, and the steps for determining included topics.  Who is ultimately responsible for approving its content?

2)    Have Facebook news curators in fact manipulated the content of the Trending Topics section, either by targeting news stories related to conservative views for exclusion or by injecting non-trending content?

3)    What steps is Facebook taking to investigate claims of politically motivated manipulation of news stories in the Trending Topics section?  If such claims are substantiated, what steps will Facebook take to hold the responsible individuals accountable?

4)    In a statement responding to the allegations, Facebook has claimed to have “rigorous guidelines in place for the review team” to prevent “the suppression of political perspectives” or the “prioritization of one viewpoint over another or one news outlet over another.”
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a.    When did Facebook first introduce these guidelines?

  1.  Please provide a copy of these guidelines, as well as any changes or amendments since January 2014.
  2.  Does Facebook provide training for its employees related to these guidelines?  If so, describe what the training consists of, as well as its frequency.
  3.  How does Facebook determine compliance with these guidelines?  Does it conduct audits?  If so, how often? What steps are taken when a violation occurs?

    5)    Does Facebook maintain a record of curators’ decisions to inject a story into the Trending Topics section or target a story for removal?  If such a record is not maintained, can such decisions be reconstructed or determined based on an analysis of the Trending Topics product?

    a.    If so, how many stories have curators excluded that represented conservative viewpoints or topics of interest to conservatives?  How many stories did curators inject that were not, in fact, trending?

  4.  Please provide a list of all news stories removed from or injected into the Trending Topics section since January 2014.

The Senate Commerce Committee exercises legislative and oversight jurisdiction over issues related to Internet communications, consumer protection, and media issues.”

In his letter to Zuckerberg, Senator Thune stated “Social networks such as Facebook are an increasingly important source of news for many Americans and people around the world.  The ability to connect with others to discuss and debate the issues of the day that such services offer has created a powerful platform for civic engagement.  Indeed, with over a billion daily active users on average, Facebook has enormous influence on users’ perceptions of current events, including political perspectives. If Facebook presents its Trending Topics section as the result of a neutral, objective algorithm, but it is in fact subjective and filtered to support or suppress particular political viewpoints, Facebook’s assertion that it maintains a ‘platform for people and perspectives from s the political spectrum’ misleads the public.”

That, of course, is the central issue.  Facebook, as an independent company not run by government, is free to present whatever viewpoint it so chooses, and should be able to do so without restriction.  However, if it solicits participation from the public based in part upon assertions that it provides nonbiased coverage of the news, then it has intentionally misled those who utilize the service.

The New York Analysis of Policy and Government is highly critical of attempts to rein in free speech in the political or any other arena. However, we find it deeply hypocritical that leftist/progressive activists continue to criticize expressions of centrist and conservative thought and seek to regulate it through campaign finance restrictions, in addition to the various attempts by the Obama Administration to oversee media activities. Meanwhile, actions such as that Facebook is accused of and which many other outlets in print and television media engage in which are clearly biased towards the left end of the spectrum go un-criticized.