The New York Times (NYT) actually produced some concrete investigative work when they released a report featuring documents that relate to a faction of Facebook admins who are against the abject Liberal biases that lie within the organization.
Mobilizing
A senior Facebook engineer, Brian Amerige, subtly posted a document on Facebook’s internal message board last week, “We Have a Problem With Political Diversity”. The post immediately acquired a buzz:
“We are a political monoculture that’s intolerant of different views. We claim to welcome all perspectives, but are quick to attack—often in mobs—anyone who presents a view that appears to be in opposition to left-leaning ideology. We throw labels that end in *obe and *ist at each other, attacking each other’s character rather than their ideas,” wrote Amerige.
The post calls for Facebook administrators to band together in order to peacefully organize and mobilize in a group called “FB’ers for Political Diversity”. According to the NYT, more than 100 Facebook employees, of the 25,000-plus person workforce, have already joined the senior engineer in creating this right-wing faction.
The full document can be found here:
Admins opposing the group have already published complaints to upper management, but for naught as the secret Facebook community did not actually break any company rules.
Evidence of Unbalanced Biases
Ideological deviance in the social media world is highly critcized. Anyone who is anything right of left-leaning is immediately treated by big tech companies as a threat.
There are a few very recent proofs to support this claim: for one, it has been publicly admitted by heads of Facebook and Twitter, among other social media platforms, that they carry left-leaning biases, such as the time where Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter claimed, “But the real question behind the question is, are we doing something according to political ideology or viewpoints? And we are not. Period.” Furthermore, the Twitter exec discusses: “I think we need to constantly show that we are not adding our own bias, which I fully admit is left, is more left-leaning.”
The next mention of evidence includes the influence of Facebook during the elections, where even the company’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, was accused of unfairly promoting liberal voices online and censoring conservative ones. The censoring of Infowars’ Alex Jones is another fairly significant event.
Moreover, while not necessarily threatening to individuals on the right, Zuckerberg is known to have openly donated to Democratic political figures in the endorsement of issues such as immigration reform, which is mostly anti-right rhetoric.
The Future of Conservatism on Social Media
Conservatives struggle rigorously to maintain leadership positions in big social media organizations. As the NYT suggests, Palmer Luckey is one of these conservatives. As the founder of the virtual reality goggles, Oculus, a product that was acquired by Facebook, Luckey was allegedly persuaded to leave after rumours circulated that he had donated to an organization with an anti-Hillary Clinton ‘meme’ campaign.
Similarly, Zuckerberg actually defended Peter Thiel, a Facebook board member, from his peers’ resignation calls, after they noticed he was a President Trump supporter. Zuckerberg indicated that it was a priority for Thiel to stay on, as the Facebook chief emphasized the significance of a diverse board.
With censorship by big tech and apparent biases over social media, this one Facebook group looks like they might very well be the platform the conservatives have been asking for in an overtly stereotypical liberal Silicon Valley media industry.
In wholly unrelated material, here’s a “Bad Lip Reading” of Zuckerberg sweating in court:
Awesome to see some resistance within these tech giants.