Copyright © 2016 - 2021, The Troy Press
Copyright © 2016 - 2021, The Troy Press
Copyright © 2016 - 2021, The Troy Press
EDITORIAL NOTE
There are two separate Facebook-specific issues here, both important, and another pair of issues have to do with Democratic Party (non-progressive) "think tank" ThinkProgress, and right-wing think-take Center for American Progress.
Contributor Randall Rose articulates many important points not covered in MSM or even The Intercept's coverage of this topic and backs it up with copious links. It's worth a read.
The Intercept ought to expose ThinkProgress's two-faced role as both "victim" and advocate of Facebook censorship. You fail to let your readers know what this dual role shows about Democratic Party elites, so I'll try to explain here.
ThinkProgress claims to be progressive, but it's really a project of the Center for American Progress, a concealed-donor-funded Washington organization aligned with the Democratic establishment which aims at influencing the public's thinking on issues. A modern political party, of course, is not merely a single organization like the DNC but instead allows most of its work to be done by a huge network of apparently independent groups. In that sense the Center for American Progress is one of the many arms of the Democratic Party, run by Clinton allies like Neera Tanden and John Podesta. ThinkProgress is their media project, and as a progressive myself, I'm not happy with their aggressive censorship efforts. In fact, even though the Intercept portrays ThinkProgress as a victim of censorship here, ThinkProgress has repeatedly been vocal in calling for Facebook, Twitter and other social media companies to remove conservative content and conservative people's accounts.
This isn't just a matter of censoring the far right, although ThinkProgress does imply that far-right people shouldn't be allowed to have accounts on big social media companies. ThinkProgress also suggests that views they don't like about climate change should be suppressed or minimized by Facebook. ThinkProgress calls for "policing Facebook" against what they portray as a "disinformation campaign on climate change, but they're pretty sweeping in what they label as disinformation. For example, ThinkProgress is aware that their rival, The Weekly Standard, will occasionally publish articles calling for Republicans to take climate change seriously, but ThinkProgress still labels The Weekly Standard as an "outlet that spreads climate disinformation" because most of The Weekly Standard's coverage suggests that climate change isn't a real problem. ThinkProgress doesn't give substantial evidence, or even any evidence, to show that The Weekly Standard actually intends to mislead people about climate issues. Instead, ThinkProgress blurs the difference between what's deliberate lying and what's not. When they label The Weekly Standard as spreading "climate disinformation", the primary TWS article that they allude to is a sympathetic profile of an eccentric climate scientist who sincerely believes that human influence on the climate is small. Since there's no evidence of any attempt to mislead, it doesn't fit the regular meaning of disinformation, but ThinkProgress still tries to stick the "disinformation" label on The Weekly Standard. So when ThinkProgress calls for policing Facebook against disinformation about climate issue, and simultaneously labels their rivals at The Weekly Standard as spreaders of disinformation on climate even when there's no evidence of lying, it's pretty clear that they want FB to reduce access to even mainstream conservative media outlets like The Weekly Standard. ThinkProgress portrays things in terms of stopping "fake news" (which, they say, is not necessarily "outright fabrication") and says "the best way to fight fake news is, first, don't expose people to it at all". I don't like what The Weekly Standard did when they helped to suppress ThinkProgress's Kavanaugh article in what was portrayed as a "fact-check", but I recognize that even before that happened, ThinkProgress had already made clear that they want to go a lot further than that in censoring The Weekly Standard, as well as suppressing other conservative voices.
Shouldn't we be thinking about why Democratic-establishment-aligned groups like ThinkProgress are so eager to suppress their opponents' voices on social media? The way major political parties work is that the party elites look at what are the powerful forces in the country that they can use to gain dominance of elections, as well as to shift how voters see things that might influence elections. ThinkProgress, and the Center for American Progress which backs it, is part of that effort by party elites to sway how ordinary people see things. And many who have influence within the Democratic Party expect, and want, the social media companies like Facebook to end up being more allied with Democrats than with Republicans. So they see Facebook, Twitter etc. as an asset for them now and in the future, and they're well aware that companies like Facebook have considerable influence over the perceptions of the voting public. It's clear that the elite of the Democratic Party aren't siding with ordinary people on issues like surveillance, online privacy or digital rights. That's only natural -- the thousands of people who play an active part in steering a major party are naturally going to work on trying to extend their dominance of elections, rather than on making plenty of space for ordinary people to freely use their voices and conversations to make change. They want to find ways to make social media into a tool for that.
ThinkProgress is therefore an enemy of some of the deepest things that The Intercept stands for.
And that's kind of illustrated by this latest episode over the Kavanaugh piece. After The Weekly Standard did manage to partially suppress this one ThinkProgress article on flimsy grounds, it's interesting how ThinkProgress responded. They do not, of course, invoke any lofty principles like freedom of speech or freedom of the press or rule by the people, because they don't believe much in things like that. Nor do they try to maintain a fair standard by saying that journalism, especially when it's more or less true, should be able to be distributed on social media -- that would be a standard which would allow both ThinkProgress and The Weekly Standard to go on publishing their journalism which contains significant truths alongside obvious partisan distortion. Instead, the way ThinkProgress responds to this episode is to continue suggesting, as they repeatedly have since last year, that it's a problem if conservative organization are allowed to do fact-checking on Facebook. That's comparable to how conservatives didn't like Facebook using fact-checkers like Snopes which have progressive ties. Groups like ThinkProgress on the Democratic side (like some of their counterparts on the right) just want to capture social media for their own side and to find ways to reduce the spread of opposing views. The elites in both major parties are more interested in trying to sway us than in letting our voices drive the agenda, although they work hard to conceal that. The fact that Dems more than Reps are trying to attract and shape progressive passions does not make them our friend. What we need is to keep the free and diverse voices of ordinary people safe from being shaped by the rival elite networks that want to use social media as one of their latest opportunities for gaining information dominance.
Sources:
https://thinkprogress.org/zuckerberg-facebook-shouldnt-stop-holocaust-deniers-7a3f957634f3/ https://thinkprogress.org/facebooks-war-against-fake-news-isnt-working-37c51e3002e7/ https://thinkprogress.org/zuckerberg-clarification-shows-facebook-wont-stop-climate-denial-fd38fbc45cd4/ https://thinkprogress.org/facebook-fake-news-continues-ddd5ee1f80b5/ https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2014/jan/06/climate-change-climate-change-scepticism https://thinkprogress.org/facebook-weekly-standard-fact-check-thinkprogress-6176df1d5749/
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