anti-conservative bias – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Meta’s ‘Facebook Supreme Court’ Touted As Success By Conservative Member And His Confirmation Bias

from the if-the-mind-can-conceive-it,-these-people-will-believe-it dept

The narrative for years has been that social media companies — most of them headquartered in California — have it in for conservatives. While the real problem tends to be actual Nazis, conservatives who feel their bigoted views have been “censored” continue to pretend West Coast liberals and the Biden Administration are to blame for private companies showing them the exit.

In 2020, Mark Zuckerberg decided the people talking out of their asses must be right. Meta formed an oversight board of sorts that would backstop moderation decisions, allowing an even smaller group of people to decide whether the algorithms or hundreds of other human moderators made the right call when taking down content.

Here’s Mike Masnick’s original coverage of the new Oversight Board, which seemed to be the subject of hate simply because Facebook is almost always the subject of hate.

Last week, Facebook finally announced the original Oversight Board members and the board itself put out its own announcement combined with a NY Times op-ed from the four “co-chairs” of the board: Catalnia Botero-Marino, Michael McConnell, Jamal Greene, and Helle Thorning-Schmidt.

As was noted in that post, it was difficult to see what impact these outsiders might have on the whole of Facebook moderation. A social media site that deals with hundreds of thousands of posts every minute was unlikely to be guided, much less reformed, by bringing in four people to oversee a job thousands of others were already doing.

And the new board itself noted it would only handle an extremely small subset of complaints about content moderation, which suggested its influence on moderation would only be noticeable to the people who overrode previous Facebook moderation decisions.

That’s where we are now. Michael McConnell is making sure everyone knows this board had a hand in restoring some political content that was previously declared to be in violation of Facebook’s policies. Here’s the meat of that decision, as delivered by the ‘Facebook Supreme Court’ itself.

In August 2024, a Facebook user posted an altered picture based on the poster for the 1994 comedy film “Dumb and Dumber.” In the altered image, the faces of the original actors are replaced by the U.S. presidential candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. As in the original poster, the two figures are grabbing each other’s nipples through their clothing. The content was posted with a caption that includes the emojis “🤷‍♂️🖕🖕.” Meta initially removed the user’s post from Facebook under its Bullying and Harassment Community Standard, which prohibits “derogatory sexualized photoshop or drawings.” When the Board brought this case to Meta’s attention, the company determined that the removal of the content was incorrect, restoring the post to Facebook. Meta explained that its Community Standards were not violated in this case because the company does not consider that pinching a person’s nipple through their clothing qualifies as sexual activity.

Now, this would mostly be a non-story if McConnell hadn’t approached conservative-leaning outlets like the New York Post and [cough] Volokh Conspiracy to make sure “conservatives” knew how hard McConnell and his fellow board members were working to ensure their views weren’t “censored.”

Of course, this statement can’t be found directly on McConnell’s Hoover Institute page. Instead, he links to the articles quoting him at length. Eugene Volokh’s quotation of McConnell appears to contain the entirety of his self-congratulatory message. And it’s hilarious, although I have to assume McConnell released it with the intent of it being taken very seriously.

This is direct from the mouth of one of the people staffing Meta’s moderation Oversight Board — one who’s completely convinced social media services are biased against “conservatives.” But all he brings to the argument is his own bias, which is not only “conservative,” but entirely of the confirmational variety. Enjoy!

Conservatives in the United States have long complained that the social media companies discriminate against right-of-center speech. It is hard to know how systemic this problem might be, because there are no good data—but there certainly are disturbing examples.

In the hands of a more rational person, the lack of good data would suggest more research is needed and that it would be irresponsible to draw conclusions from this lack of evidence.

But board member/guy who thinks he doing right by the Right McConnell has decided the lack of evidence proves something and that assumption will remain in place until when (but more likely, if) he’s able to find the data that supports his presuppositions.

Most of the rest of his statement explains why so few moderation complaints have been handled by the Oversight Board. And, again, McConnell presents presuppositions without the “good data” he needs to support these assertions.

First, he claims Meta does actually respond to complaints from supposedly “censored” conservatives.

[W]hen users point out obvious errors in taking down legitimate posts, Meta’s internal system often corrects the decision within a few days or a week.

But that’s not good enough for McConnell because it’s not fast enough.

A few days or a week is long enough to do the harm; speech on political issues is usually stale after that time has passed. But if errors are corrected in that time frame, the case will never come to the Oversight Board.

The problems are solved, but not quickly enough to make people (falsely) crying “censorship” happy. His other theory is that his fellow conservatives view protesting content moderation decisions as pointless, assuming (perhaps correctly in some cases) their particular complaints won’t be considered important enough to be handled in a timely fashion, if they’re ever handled at all.

Nonetheless, McConnell says the review board is a good thing (for “people of all political stripes,” even though he’s obviously notified his fellow conservatives of this effort first). It can take cases referred to it and handle them more quickly than Meta’s existing moderation team. Of course, the flip side of this is that the Oversight Board can pick and choose which complaints it wishes to handle. And if McConnell thinks this won’t result in more bias, rather than less, it’s only because he’s clearly willing to get high on his own supply.

Filed Under: anti-conservative bias, confirmation bias, content moderation, michael mcconnell
Companies: meta

from the hypocrisy-is-the-only-principle dept

As we head into next week’s election, it is worth taking a step back and realizing how absolutely ridiculous it is that we spent five or six years with people insisting that Facebook and Twitter absolutely needed to be punished for supposedly engaging in biased content moderation (something they did not do).

While any private media entity has a First Amendment right to use its editorial discretion however it wants, including in a biased way, we were subject to years of freakouts from (usually) Republican politicians and supporters about how social media moderation was clearly illegal election interference.

Remember, we had to sit through multiple hours-long hearings in which Republicans screamed at tech company CEOs about their apparent “bias” in how they ran their companies, despite no actual bias being evident. Hell, the GOP is still engaged in a lawsuit claiming that Gmail’s spam filter is illegally biased against them (it’s not) and somehow that’s election interference (it’s not).

Even more ridiculous, even Mark Zuckerberg’s totally non-partisan attempt to donate to groups working on making sure elections were safe and fair was turned into a giant conspiracy theory claiming he was abusing his wealth to elect Biden (again something multiple studies — not to mention common sense — showed was not at all true). It got so ridiculous that Zuckerberg felt the need to cower before Jim Jordan and apologize, despite doing nothing wrong.

At the same time, we had Congressional hearings (sometimes the same ones!) in which Democrats demanded tech CEOs explain how they were dealing with “election misinformation.” This led to various companies setting up “election integrity” teams who tried to do good work… until Jim Jordan pretended that even the actions of having election officials alert social media companies to people impersonating election officials, or pushing voter-themed phishing scams, was election interference.

Of course, all of this is just background to the fact that, today, at this moment, Elon Musk is doing way more to swing the election to Trump than what the GOP falsely imagined big tech companies were doing in the past to help Biden.

And… we hear crickets.

I don’t expect that the modern GOP would call out this hypocrisy. After all, the driving principle behind the modern GOP is “everything anyone who is not a MAGA Trumpist does should be considered against the law, and everything MAGA folks do is perfectly fine.”

But, shouldn’t someone be calling it out?

Over at the Atlantic, Charlie Warzel has the latest example of extreme nonsense happening now on ExTwitter. Rather than Election Integrity, Musk appears to be using his control of the platform to further ridiculous, nonsensical, election conspiracy theories and propaganda.

Nothing better encapsulates X’s ability to sow informational chaos than the Election Integrity Community—a feed on the platform where users are instructed to subscribe and “share potential incidents of voter fraud or irregularities you see while voting in the 2024 election.” The community, which was launched last week by Musk’s America PAC, has more than 34,000 members; roughly 20,000 have joined since Musk promoted the feed last night. It is jammed with examples of terrified speculation and clearly false rumors about fraud. Its top post yesterday morning was a long rant from a “Q Patriot.” His complaint was that when he went to vote early in Philadelphia, election workers directed him to fill out a mail-in ballot and place it in a secure drop box, a process he described as “VERY SKETCHY!” But this is, in fact, just how things work: Pennsylvania’s early-voting system functions via on-demand mail-in ballots, which are filled in at polling locations. The Q Patriot’s post, which has been viewed more than 62,000 times, is representative of the type of fearmongering present in the feed and a sterling example of a phenomenon recently articulated by the technology writer Mike Masnick, where “everything is a conspiracy theory when you don’t bother to educate yourself.”

Elsewhere in the Election Integrity Community, users have reposted debunked theories from 2020 about voting machines switching votes, while others are sharing old claims of voter fraud from past local elections. Since Musk promoted the feed last night, it has become an efficient instrument for incitement and harassment; more users are posting about individual election workers, sometimes singling them out by name. In many instances, users will share a video, purportedly from a polling location, while asking questions like “Is this real?” This morning, the community accused a man in Northampton County, Pennsylvania, of stealing ballots. Popular right-wing influencers such as Alex Jones amplified the claim, but their suspect turned out to be the county’s postmaster, simply doing his job.

The most important feature of the Election Integrity Community is the sheer volume of posts: dozens per hour, such that scrolling through them becomes overwhelming. It presents the viewer with fragmented pieces of information—more than any casual news consumer (or most election offices, for that matter) might be able to confirm or debunk. And so the feed is the purest distillation of what Musk’s platform wishes to accomplish. He has created a bullshit machine.

It’s not new that Musk has built himself a snowglobe of confirmation bias. We know that’s true. It’s somewhat ironic that he’s now doing so under the name “Election Integrity,” which was the very function forced upon social media companies in the hopes that private companies would magically protect our elections against malicious interference attempts.

But at least someone should be calling out the blatant hypocrisy. All of the non-Musk tech execs spent years being raked over the coals for completely hallucinated concerns about “bias.” And here is Musk not just turning ExTwitter into a full time pro-Trump propaganda engine, but the very same people who screamed about (non-existent) “election interference” from those other companies are somehow cheering Musk on.

Remember the whole “Google is engaging in election interference because Gmail puts more GOP emails in spam” thing? The study they based that on didn’t really show any indication of bias. First off, it found the reverse in Outlook and YahooMail (more Dem emails went to spam, but somehow no one ever mentions that). Also, as the authors of the study explained, the entire “effect” in Gmail went away if someone made any attempt to “train” their spam filter. This was a complete nothingburger, and yet the GOP is still trying to make a big deal of it.

Or, hell, just last week, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey (who has shown himself willing to push all sorts of censorial, partisan bullshit) “launched an investigation” into Google, claiming that it puts pro-Trump results further down in search rankings.

Yet, where is Bailey’s investigation into this?

This algorithmic prioritization represents the second prong of the approach: granting far-right influencers and the MAGA faithful greater reach with their posts. A Washington Post analysis of lawmaker tweets from July 2023 to the present day show that Republican officials’ posts go viral far more often than Democrats’ do, and that Musk’s right-wing political activism has encouraged Republican lawmakers to post more, too, “allowing them to greatly outnumber Democrats on users’ feeds.” According to the Post, “Republicans’ tweets totaled more than 7.5 billion views since July 2023—more than double the Democrats’ 3.3 billion.” Musk has effectively turned the platform into a far-right social network and echo chamber, not unlike Rumble and Truth Social. The difference, of course, is X’s size and audience, which still contains many prominent influencers, celebrities, athletes, and media members.

No such investigation is forthcoming. Indeed, Bailey regularly cheers on Musk for doing this kind of thing.

So here I am, shouting into the wind. What Musk is doing may be legal. But so was what every other company was doing in the past (which wasn’t even biased in the first place). It’s not just the hypocrisy that is so ridiculous. It’s the fact that they continue to insist that companies are doing “illegal” things that are biased against them when (1) that’s not happening and (2) they’re doing way more biased things on behalf of Trump.

In the end, sticking with the GOP credo, their issue was never actually about bias or “election interference.” It was always about “wait, why aren’t we engaging in this kind of thing?”

I know it doesn’t matter. Trump fans will make up reasons this is “different” (and it is, because this is actually happening as opposed to the other stuff they claimed, which wasn’t), but it does feel that someone should call out this hypocrisy.

Filed Under: anti-conservative bias, bias, content moderation, donald trump, election interference, elon musk
Companies: facebook, google, meta, twitter, x

Researchers Confirm: Content Moderation Appears To Target Dangerous Nonsense, Not Political Ideology

from the maybe-stop-pushing-bullshit-so-often-and-you-won't-get-moderated? dept

Going back many, many years, we’ve written about how the public narrative that the large social media networks engage in “anti-conservative bias” in their content moderation policies is bullshit. Because it is. And now we have yet another scientific study to prove this.

The first time we covered it was in response to a ridiculous “study” from MAGA darling and “unremarkable racist” Richard Hanania. He released a ridiculously embarrassing study claiming to “prove” anti-conservative bias in Twitter suspensions. It was based on a self-collected set of just 22 examples of accounts suspended from Twitter, in which Hanania noted that 21 of the 22 accounts were “Trump supporters.” What he left out of his analysis was that a bunch of those “Trump supporters” were… out and out neo-Nazis, including (I’m not joking) the American Nazi Party account.

Since then, many other actual studies have called bullshit on the claims of anti-conservative bias in moderation. Indeed, the evidence has suggested that both Twitter and Facebook even adjusted the rules to allow for even greater levels of rules violations for MAGA supporters, just to avoid the appearance of anti-conservative bias. That is, their bias was actually pro-MAGA in that they loosened the rules for Trump-supporting accounts, allowing them to break the rules more frequently.

This is what people mean when they talk about “working the refs.” So much of the whining and complaining about how everyone is “biased” against “conservatives” (though I’d argue the MAGA movement is hardly “conservative”) is really about making sure that anyone in a position of gatekeeping or arbiting gives them more leeway to break the rules, simply to avoid the appearance of bias.

That means that in continually accusing everyone (mainstream media, social media, etc.) of unfair bias against the MAGA movement, we actually get the exact opposite: an unfair bias that gives MAGA folks a pass on breaking not just the rules, but general societal norms like… not contesting the results of a presidential election.

Two years ago (just as Elon Musk was gearing up to acquire Twitter to fight back against what he insisted was “bias” in their moderation policies), we wrote about a preprint of a study by a group of researchers, including David Rand, Mohsen Mosleh, Qi Yang, Tauhid Zaman, and Gordon Pennycook.

This week, an updated version of that study has finally been published in the prestigious journal, Nature. Its findings are pretty clear: content moderation does not appear to be focused on ideology, but does target potentially dangerous disinformation. The simple reality is that the MAGA world is way, way, way, way more likely to post absolute fucking nonsense.

We first analysed 9,000 politically active Twitter users during the US 2020 presidential election. Although users estimated to be pro-Trump/conservative were indeed substantially more likely to be suspended than those estimated to be pro-Biden/liberal, users who were pro-Trump/conservative also shared far more links to various sets of low-quality news sites—even when news quality was determined by politically balanced groups of laypeople, or groups of only Republican laypeople—and had higher estimated likelihoods of being bots. We find similar associations between stated or inferred conservatism and low-quality news sharing (on the basis of both expert and politically balanced layperson ratings) in 7 other datasets of sharing from Twitter, Facebook and survey experiments, spanning 2016 to 2023 and including data from 16 different countries. Thus, even under politically neutral anti-misinformation policies, political asymmetries in enforcement should be expected. Political imbalance in enforcement need not imply bias on the part of social media companies implementing anti-misinformation policies.

I think it’s important that these researchers point out that they even had groups of “only Republicans” rate the quality of the news sources that the MAGA world was pushing.

Often in discussions around bias in a different context, there are debates about whether or not it makes sense for there to be equality in opportunity vs. equality in outcomes. This is often demonstrated in some variation of this graphic, created by the Interaction Institute for Social Change, which has become quite a meme and comes up in lots of culture war discussions.

But, in many ways, the debate on social media moderation and bias is just a different form of that same argument (though, in some weird ways, with the viewpoints reversed from conservative/liberal thinking). On issues of bias in opportunity, the “traditional” (grossly generalized!) view is that “conservatives” want equality in opportunity (the left side of the picture) and “liberals” prefer equality of outcomes (the second picture).

When it comes to social media moderation, the roles seem somewhat reversed. The MAGA world insists that since they get moderated more often, showing that the “outcomes are uneven,” it proves an unfair bias.

Yet, as this study shows, if the inputs (i.e., the likelihood of sharing absolutely dangerous bullshit nonsense) are uneven, then of course the outputs will be uneven.

And that’s even true after working the refs. When the MAGA world is so committed to pushing blatantly false misinformation, some of which could cause real harm which a platform might not want to support, the outcome may still show that they end up getting suspended more often, even when sites like Facebook bend over backwards to give MAGA folks more leeway to violate its rules.

The study makes that clear. It notes that the greatest predictor of getting suspended was not “are you conservative?” but “are you sharing bullshit?” For people who supported Trump but didn’t share nonsense, they were less likely to be suspended. People who supported Biden (in 2020) but did share nonsense, were more likely to be suspended.

The determining factor here was sharing nonsense, not political ideology. It’s just that Trump supporters shared way more nonsense.

The researchers also explore what would happen if a totally “neutral anti-misinformation policy” were implemented. And… they found nearly identical results:

Using this approach, we find that suspending users for sharing links to news sites deemed to be untrustworthy by politically balanced groups of laypeopleleads to higher rates of suspension for Republicans than Democrats… For example, if users have a 1% chance of getting suspended each time they share a low-quality link, 2.41 times more users who shared Trump hashtags would be suspended compared with users who shared Biden hashtags (d = 0.63; t-test, t(8,998) = 30.1, P < 0.0001). Findings are equivalent when basing suspension on expert assessments of the 60 news sites, or when correlating predicted suspension rate with ideology (0.31 < r < 0.39, depending on ideology measure; P < 0.0001 for all); …

[….]

These analyses show that even in the absence of any (intentional) disparate treatment on the part of technology companies, partisan asymmetries in sanctioned behaviours will lead to (unintentional) disparate impact whereby conservatives are suspended at greater rates. From a legal perspective, political orientation is not a protected class in the USA and thus neither form of disparate treatment is illegal (although potentially still normatively undesirable). Although disparate impact may reasonably be considered to constitute discrimination in some cases (for example, employment discrimination on the basis of job-irrelevant factors that correlate with race), in the present context reducing the spread of misinformation and the prevalence of bots are legitimate and necessary goals for social media platforms. This makes a normative case for disparate impact on the basis of political orientation.

This shouldn’t be surprising to folks who have followed this space for a while. Indeed, it confirms a lot of what many of us have been saying for years. But it’s certainly nice to have the data to support the findings.

Filed Under: anti-conservative bias, content moderation, david rand, research

from the well,-if-that's-what-it-takes dept

MAGA world’s false belief that Joe Biden is “censoring conservatives” on social media may actually kill the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA). As we mentioned earlier this week, while KOSA has already passed the Senate and advanced in a different form out of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, there were still big concerns among House leadership that likely prevented the bill from moving forward.

Some of those concerns were legit and some were not. It appears that House Leadership is leaning in on the concerns based on a myth that they made up and apparently now believe to be true.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise made it clear that House leadership has some problems with the bill, in an interview with the Washington Times:

Mr. Scalise said there would not be action on the legislation before the Nov. 5 election and declined to predict whether it could advance later this year before the current Congress ends. He said he’s provided feedback to Energy and Commerce members leading the bills, and “everybody’s going to keep working,” but the concerns raised by various ideological GOP caucuses are “important to note.”

Among the outstanding concerns is that the bills, particularly KOSA, give too much power to the executive branch to regulate online content.

“You want to protect kids, but you don’t want to give more ability to the Biden administration to censor conservatives. And unfortunately, they’ve abused these powers in the past,” Mr. Scalise said. “And so you got to narrow it. You got to focus it just on kids.”

This is somewhat hilarious and stupid. Yes, KOSA could be used for censorship, which is why we’ve spent years calling out its many flaws. But the claim that the “Biden administration” has “abused these powers in the past” to “censor conservatives” is a myth. It’s a myth made up by the MAGA world.

We’ve gone over this before. Multiple studies have found no evidence to support the claims that social media companies engaged in politically biased content removals. Indeed, many of the studies have found that sites actually adjusted the rules to give Trump supporters more leeway in breaking the rules to avoid even the false appearance of bias.

Then there are the false claims that the Biden administration, in particular, engaged in censorship of conservatives. But that’s made-up fantasyland nonsense based on a misunderstanding of reality. It is true that the administration requested that social media companies do a better job dealing with COVID and election misinformation. However, the companies basically all either pushed back on those requests or ignored them entirely.

As the Supreme Court made clear in its Murthy ruling, there’s a huge difference between using the bully pulpit of the Presidency to encourage certain activities (perfectly legal and expected) and illegally coercing speech suppression (which would violate the First Amendment). The Supreme Court noted that the lower courts had mixed those things up, as had the plaintiffs in that case.

As the majority of the Court noted, all of the moderation scenarios presented in the lawsuit seemed perfectly normal content moderation decisions that platforms always make, exercising their own editorial discretion. The scenarios showed no signs of interference or coercion from the administration.

We reject this overly broad assertion. As already discussed, the platforms moderated similar content long before any of the Government defendants engaged in the challenged conduct. In fact, the platforms, acting independently, had strengthened their pre-existing content-moderation policies before the Government defendants got involved….

This evidence indicates that the platforms had independent incentives to moderate content and often exercised their own judgment.

Yet, MAGA world still wants to insist that this myth is true. They made up the myth whole cloth based on a cluelessness with trust & safety.

And now that myth might kill KOSA. Yay?

To be clear, there are all sorts of reasons that KOSA should go away. It includes problematic censorial powers that could be abused by any administration seeking to remove content for ideological reasons. And there are principled reasons why Republicans should reject KOSA. Senator Rand Paul recently laid out a compelling argument for why KOSA is bad that had nothing to do with culture war nonsense or made up fairy tales.

But here, it appears that the GOP’s leadership may have played themselves into making the right call for the right underlying reasons (the censorship powers), but based on a near total misunderstanding of how the world actually works.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, anti-conservative bias, censorship, content moderation, kosa, murthy v. missouri, steve scalise

When Will Jim Jordan Hold A Hearing About Elon’s ExTwitter Bias?

from the let's-see-how-many-angry-commenters-read-past-the-headline dept

I’m curious how Republicans would react if AOC suddenly sought to hold a hearing questioning Elon Musk’s bias in endorsing and promoting Donald Trump on ExTwitter. I imagine there would be apocalyptic outrage and nonstop cries of tyranny over such a blatant abuse of power to punish someone for their political views.

And they’d be right.

But it’s striking that no one batted an eye when the Republicans did that over the past few years.

For years, we highlighted how the claims of supposed “leftwing bias” in content moderation at the various big platform websites was total bullshit. Studies repeatedly showed that it wasn’t true at all. If anything, these websites bent over backwards to cater to rule-breaking Trumpists.

And yet, Congress held multiple hearings, in which Republican senators and congressional reps would drag the CEOs of the companies into hours-long hearings to demand to know why they were “censoring” conservative speech and to harangue them for their biases.

As we said at the time, this was deeply problematic and an attack on free speech (something you’ll never hear any of the free speech grifter crew ever mention). In one hearing, the CEOs were asked to reveal the political registrations of their employees, which is none of anyone’s business.

Either way, as things stand right now, Elon (who once insisted that Twitter must remain “neutral”) has loudly endorsed (and promised to fund the campaign of) Donald Trump.

Since then, his ExTwitter feed is just a non-stop flood of pro-Trump content.

And, to be clear, he is absolutely free to do this. That is his free speech. And also, ExTwitter, as a company, also has its own free speech rights to do the same exact thing.

Meanwhile, companies like Meta have chosen to hire one of the main authors of the Project 2025 plan from Heritage Foundation, which is the playbook of authoritarian vengeance and retribution planned for the second Trump administration. The biggest VCs in Silicon Valley are all lining up behind Trump under the cynical belief that a chaotic 2nd term will somehow help the tech industry.

It’s almost as if the idea that the industry were just bastions of leftist thought, who used their power to stifle conservatives was always overblown nonsense, used to try to punish the companies for their own (and their employees’) speech.

So, why isn’t Congress calling for investigations?

I mean, obviously, the answer is that it was all grandstanding nonsense for the ignorant. It was all for show, control, and power. It was never actually about policy, because Washington DC these days isn’t about policy. It’s pure politics of power.

And, again, let me be clear: it would be a travesty for anyone to investigate Elon’s company (or the other platforms) for bias now. It would be an attack on the platforms and their owners for exercising their First Amendment rights. But it was equally bad the last few years as well, and that didn’t stop the Republicans in Congress from doing so. Nor were there many voices raised in protest about the types of questions they were asked, because attacking tech was seen as a bipartisan game (though the attacks were different).

So, of course, I’m not really calling on Congress to go through that nonsense again. But it does seem worth pointing out the utter hypocrisy of those who called and cheered on those show trials and how they will never even think about doing the same thing now.

It’s almost as if Congress isn’t concerned with the actual policy issues, but rather abusing their power to harass those they view as political opponents.

Filed Under: alexandria ocasio-cortez, anti-conservative bias, bias, congress, content moderation, donald trump, elon musk, grandstanding, jim jordan
Companies: meta, twitter, x

Internal Twitter Video Reveals Twitter Bent Over Backwards To Protect Trump And Pro-Trump Insurrectionists

from the still-won't-convince-the-gullible dept

I don’t know how many times it needs to be said, but since so many are still insisting the opposite is true, I guess many more times: Twitter’s moderation policies were not driven by some anti-conservative bias, nor were they pushed by the government to block Trump or his supporters. We have, of course, discussed all this before, but now the Washington Post got its hands on a video recording of an internal Twitter meeting right before the January 6th attack on the Capitol, in which they discussed how to handle the growing calls for violence.

Nothing in the video is surprising, as it all confirms what’s been said before, but it does provide more evidence. The video, and testimony from some people involved in this and related meetings, were part of why the January 6th Committee highlighted just how far Twitter staff bent over backwards to protect Trump and conservatives on the platform.

And, it’s confirming what a former Twitter trust & safety employee testified under oath, about how when they saw a tweet by Donald Trump that clearly violated the site’s policies, the decision Twitter’s leadership made was to rewrite the rules to effectively exempt Trump’s tweet.

That’s not even getting into the many studies, both internal and external to Twitter, that showed no evidence of anti-conservative bias in Twitter’s moderation policies. In fact, Twitter’s own research showed that it favored conservative tweets, with its algorithm promoting them more than non-conservative tweets.

And the new video, again, shows that the company wanted to give every possible leeway to Trump’s supporters, even as some were advocating violence (some of which later occurred):

On Jan. 5, 2021, the lawyers and specialists on Twitter’s safety policy team, which set rules about violent content, were bracing for a day of brutality in Washington. In the weeks since President Donald Trump had tweeted a call for his supporters to gather in the nation’s capital for a protest he promised would be “wild,” the site had erupted with pledges of political vengeance and plans for a military-style assault.

“I am very concerned about what happens tomorrow, especially given what we have been seeing,” one member of the team, Anika Collier Navaroli, said in a video call, the details of which are reported here for the first time. “For months we have been allowing folks to maintain and say on the platform that they’re locked and loaded, that they’re ready to shoot people, that they’re ready to commit violence.”

Some participants in the call pushed the company to adopt a tougher position, arguing that moderators should be able to remove what they called “coded incitements to violence” — messages, such as “locked and loaded,” that could be read as threats. But a senior manager dismissed the idea, saying executives wanted them to take action against only the most flagrant rules violations, adding, “We didn’t want to go too far.”

I think this is actually a fully defensible position, especially as it wasn’t entirely clear how far all the talk would go. But it also blows a big hole in the idea that Twitter was actively seeking to suppress such voices.

The same records that the Post obtained show that Twitter was also very reluctant to suspend Trump:

But the records reveal a company that fought until the end to give some of Trump’s most belligerent supporters the benefit of the doubt, even as its internal teams faced an overwhelming volume of tweets threatening retribution in line with Trump’s lies that the election had been stolen.

They also show that Twitter’s leaders were reluctant to take action against Trump’s account two days after the insurrection, even as lawyers inside the company argued that his continued praise of the Capitol rioters amounted to “glorification of violence,” an offense punishable then by suspension under Twitter’s rules.

And, one more thing: the records suggest that the narrative about the Biden administration (or, at the time, campaign and then transition team) having anything to do with the Trump suspension is false:

None of the records obtained by The Washington Post — including the 32-minute video, a five-page retrospective memo outlining the suspension discussions, and a 114-page agenda document detailing the safety policy team’s meetings and conversations — show any contacts with federal officials pushing the company to take any action involving Trump’s account.

Again, none of this should be a surprise to you if you’ve been following the actual details. Versions of all of this information have come out, repeatedly. Though, these new records provide some more details on what actually happened inside of the company:

On the night of Jan. 6, after law enforcement officials had fought to regain control of the Capitol grounds, Twitter briefly suspended Trump’s account but said it would allow him to return after 12 hours if he deleted three tweets that broke Twitter’s “civic integrity” rules against manipulating or interfering in elections. One tweet included a video in which he called for peace from the “very special” rioters who he said had been “hurt” because the “fraudulent election … was stolen from us.”

The former Twitter executive said the company sent Trump’s representatives an email on Jan. 6 saying that his account would face an immediate ban if he broke another rule and that the executives hoped, with a 12-hour timeout, Trump would “get the message.”

Trump deleted the tweets and, on Jan. 7, posted a conciliatory video in which he said that “this moment calls for healing and reconciliation.” The next day, however, he tweeted a more fiery message about how the “American Patriots” who voted for him would “not be disrespected” and announced that he would not attend Joe Biden’s inauguration.

The documents then discuss the internal back and forth (some of which we’ve already talked about with regards to the — widely misinterpreted — Twitter Files) between employees at Twitter about what to do in response to Trump’s account potentially inspiring violence. As we’ve heard before, and the notes obtained by the Post confirm, there was a somewhat passionate debate internally, with many arguing that his tweets did not go so far as to incite violence, while others argued that Trump’s messages were clearly coded to encourage the January 6th insurrectionists to continue to attack our Democratic institutions.

And, again, there seemed to be back and forth debate, not driven by any political ideology, or with any input from anyone outside the company, debating how to handle the account:

Still, some Twitter executives voiced hesitation about taking down Trump’s account, arguing that “reasonable minds could differ” as to the intentions of Trump’s tweets, according to Navaroli’s document. Twitter had for years declined to hold Trump to the same rules as everyone else on the basis that world leaders’ views were especially important for voters to hear.

At a 2 p.m. video call on Jan. 8, which was described in the document but not viewed by The Post, top officials in Twitter’s trust and safety team questioned the “glorification of violence” argument and debated whether the company should instead wait to act until Trump more blatantly broke the platform’s rules.

Navaroli argued that this course of inaction had “led us to the current crisis situation” and could lead “to the same end result — continued violence and death in a nation in the midst of a sociopolitical crisis,” the document shows.

In another call, around 3:30 p.m., after safety policy team members had compiled examples of tweets in which users detailed plans for future violence, Twitter’s top lawyers and policy officials voiced support for a “permanent suspension” of Trump’s account. One note in the safety policy agenda document read that there was a “team consensus that this is a [violation]” due to Trump’s “pattern of behavior.”

Their assessment was sent to Dorsey and Gadde for final approval and, at 6:21 p.m., Twitter’s policy team was notified over Slack that Trump had been suspended. A company tweet and blog post announced the decision to the world shortly after.

There’s a lot more in the Post’s story, which covers a ton of background info as well. Anyone who is discussing this stuff owes it to themselves to read the whole thing. But it gives yet another stack of evidence confirming what all of the earlier evidence had shown: that Twitter bent over backwards to keep Trump on the platform, that the decision to remove him was deeply debated and focused on issues around fears of actual violence, not political ideology, and that there was no evidence of any interference or involvement from anyone outside of Twitter, let alone anyone associated with the Biden transition team.

And yet, there are still some extremely motivated, ignorant, and/or gullible people out there who believe the opposite is true.

I’m assuming that this new evidence won’t convince them, because they seem to brush off and ignore any evidence that debunk their hallucinations. But, for everyone else, it’s useful reinforcement for what has already been shown to be true.

Filed Under: anti-conservative bias, content moderation, donald trump, january 6th, violence
Companies: twitter

Arizona GOP Secretary Of State Candidate Insists ‘Deep State’ Google Is Blocking His Website; Turns Out He Requested It Not Be Indexed

from the stupidity-or-incompetence dept

These days, the conspiracy-minded GOP candidates (who seem to be an increasing majority of the party right now) seem to believe that there needs to be a conspiracy against them or they’re just not that important. It can be the deep state, big tech, or the “woke banks” or whatever, but someone must be coming to get them. It’s all nonsense. Mark Finchem is the GOP candidate in Arizona for Secretary of State. If he wins, he’ll be one of a distressingly high number of politicians in charge of future elections who believes — against all facts and evidence — that the 2020 election was fraudulent. Such people can do an awful lot of damage.

Anyway, this week Finchem insisted that Google and its “deeps state algorithm” was blocking his campaign website to try to stymie his campaign:

And it is true that if you search for his campaign website on Google, you come up empty (though you do find lots of other stuff about him, including his lies about the 2020 election). However as Grid News figured out, the reality is not just different, but (for yet another reason) raises serious questions about Finchem’s competence. It turns out that Finchem’s campaign inserted a “noindex” meta tag… telling Google not to index it or show it in search. I mean, it’s right there for anyone to see:

If you can’t see that image, it’s a screenshot of the source code on his website, showing some of the meta tags, and it looks like they used the AIOSEO plugins to setup their SEO tags. In this case, they chose to block search engines, as seen in the meta tag:

This leads to one of two possible conclusions. Option one is that Finchem is so desperate to be seen as being oppressed that he literally (if hamfistedly) had his campaign block Google from indexing his site so he could claim to be deplatformed from Google.

Or, option two is that the guy who might soon be in charge of Arizona state elections is so incompetent and so stupid that he accidentally blocked Google from searching his website:

I honestly can’t decide which possibility is more damning. As Grid notes, it looks like this deliberate change to Finchem’s website was made somewhere in mid-July, because that meta tag wasn’t there before that.

They also got an appropriately dry comment from Google basically saying if Finchem wants to be “replatformed” he should, uh, remove his own tag telling Google to deplatform him:

“The webmaster for this site has instructed Google and other search engines not to include the site’s homepage in our search results by using a ‘noindex’ directive,” the spokesman said in an email to Grid. “If a site wishes to appear in search results, they can remove the ‘noindex’ directive.”

Of course, this won’t actually matter to many of his supporters and many in the nonsense-peddling parts of the Trumpist world. I imagine we’re going to be hearing for months about how Google “censored” this guy, when the truth is he appears to have chosen to deliberately “censor” himself and then blame others for it.

Filed Under: anti-conservative bias, arizona, bias, deplatformed, mark finchem, meta tags, noindex, search, secretary of state
Companies: google

Fascinating New Study Suggests (Again) That Twitter Moderation Is Biased Against Misinformation, Not Conservatives

Behold! An actually interesting academic study exploring whether or not Twitter moderation has an anti-conservative bias! This is something many of us have been asking for for a while, but it’s a very difficult thing to study in any meaningful way. The results of this study are actually really fascinating, but it’s important to dig into some of the background first.

I know, I know, it’s become a key part of “the narrative” that social media websites have an “anti-conservative bias” in how they moderate. As we’ve pointed out over and over again there remains little evidence to support this. Content moderation is impossible to do well at scale. Mistakes are always going to be made, and pointing to this or that anecdote, without context, isn’t proving anything regarding bias. Indeed, every single “example” I’ve seen people trot out as “evidence” of anti-conservative bias, upon looking more closely, falls apart.

Take, for example, the popular claim that Twitter blocking a NY Post tweet about Hunter Biden’s laptop is proof of bias. However, as we discussed at the time, Twitter very clearly had a policy forbidding the linking to “hacked” documents. And Twitter had actually used that same policy to shut down DDoSecrets’ account for… publishing documents that exposed law enforcement wrongdoing. So, here we have evidence that the same policy was used to block links to articles about police misconduct as well (which would generally be a key liberal talking point, less a conservative one) and the Biden laptop article.

Now, to be clear, we always thought this policy was stupid and were happy that Twitter changed its policy on this point soon after. But, the company did nothing to stop the actual discussions of Biden’s laptop (just links to that one story), and Twitter had already shown that it enforced that policy against publications that would be mostly seen as “left leaning” as well. That’s not proof of bias. Just bad policy.

There have been a few attempts to “study” whether or not anti-conservative bias actually is happening, but they all come up empty. I mean, there was one ridiculous and non-scientific study that said that Twitter’s decision to remove accounts like the American Nazi Party along with some noted white supremacists proved an anti-conservative bias, but when conservatives are self-identifying with the American Nazi Party, then your argument about bias already is going to have some issues.

There was another study looking at Facebook, performed by a subsidiary of Facebook (though, the data all seemed legit), that suggested at least on Facebook that the company was willing to promote Trumpist voices more than anti-Trump voices. But that still wasn’t proving very much.

There certainly have been other reports about what’s going on inside these companies, including how Mark Zuckerberg had Facebook change its rules to better protect Trumpists (again suggesting the opposite of anti-conservative bias). Or about how Twitter had to dial back an algorithmic change that would have suppressed white supremacists because that algorithm was having trouble distinguishing neo-Nazis from prominent Republicans (see the report above about the American Nazi Party).

Separately, there is an issue in that when conservatives (really Trump supporting conservatives) are suspended… they tend to yell more loudly about it. Over the weekend I saw a discussion in response to a very prominent investor saying that it was obvious that Twitter was biased against conservatives, where a few self-identifying conservatives said that they’d never heard of any non-conservative getting suspended from Twitter… while also admitting they didn’t follow any (without recognizing how this might bias their own views). The fact is that non-conservative users are frequently suspended as well — often for things like calling out racism or pushing back against homophobia. But those don’t get blasted all over Fox News.

Anyway, that finally takes us to this new study, done by four researchers from a variety of different universities (mainly MIT and Yale): Qi Yang, Mohsen Mosleh, Tauhid Zaman and David Rand. Now, it’s important to note that this study specifically looked at political speech (the area that people are most concerned about, even though the reality is that this is a tiny fraction of what most content moderation efforts deal with), and it did find that a noticeably larger number of Republicans had their accounts banned than Democrats in their study (with a decently large sample size). However, that did not mean that it showed bias. Indeed, the study is quite clever, in that it corrected for generally agreed upon false information sharers — and the conclusion is that Twitter’s content moderation is biased against agreed-upon misinformation rather than political bias. It’s just that Republicans were shown to be much, much, much more willing to share such misinformation.

Social media companies are often accused of anti-conservative bias, particularly in terms of which users they suspend. Here, we evaluate this possibility empirically. We begin with a survey of 4,900 Americans, which showed strong bi-partisan support for social media companies taking actions against online misinformation. We then investigated potential political bias in suspension patterns and identified a set of 9,000 politically engaged Twitter users, half Democratic and half Republican, in October 2020, and followed them through the six months after the U.S. 2020 election.

During that period, while only 7.7% of the Democratic users were suspended, 35.6% of the Republican users were suspended. The Republican users, however, shared substantially more news from misinformation sites –as judged by either fact-checkers or politically balanced crowds –than the Democratic users. Critically, we found that users’ misinformation sharing was as predictive of suspension as was their political orientation. Thus, the observation that Republicans were more likely to be suspended than Democrats provides no support for the claim that Twitter showed political bias in its suspension practices. Instead, the observed asymmetry could be explained entirely by the tendency of Republicans to share more misinformation. While support for action against misinformation is bipartisan, the sharing of misinformation –at least at this historical moment –is heavily asymmetric across parties. As a result, our study shows that it is inappropriate to make inferences about political bias from asymmetries in suspension rates.

Now, I know that some people are going to just rush to the results of this, and the differing number of Republican accounts suspended compared to Democratic accounts, but as the authors of this study make abundantly clear, that’s a mistake.

I suggest reading the study, where the methodology seems quite sound. The key finding is what best predicts whether an account will be suspended — and it’s not the political orientation or beliefs of the tweeter. It’s whether or not they’re sharing blatant misinformation. In fact, the study found that using toxic or offensive language was even less of a predictor. Twitter allows for vigorous and even angry debate (as shouldn’t surprise anyone who is on the site regularly). But if you’re regularly pushing total nonsense, you might get suspended.

Now, I can already hear some people screaming that “misinformation” is in the eye of the beholder, so it’s possible a study like this would inaccurately count certain content favored by, let’s just say, Republicans as misinformation. However, even there, the researchers appeared to bend over backwards to try to make this as fair as possible. They used other studies that involved many different raters to judge which sources were reliable and which were not (i.e., they didn’t just pick which sources they favored).

Another interesting piece of the study was that they also ran a survey of both Democrats and Republicans to see whether or not they thought that social media sites should try to reduce misinformation and found that even among Republicans there was strong agreement that reducing misinformation was the right approach.

We begin by assessing public attitudes about whether social media companies should take actions against misinformation on their platforms, and how these attitudes vary by respondent partisanship (results are qualitatively equivalent when examining variation by respondent ideology). When N=1,228 respondents were asked whether or not social media companies should try to reduce the spread of misinformation and fake news on their platforms, 80.0% responded “Yes”. Is this support for platform action bipartisan? While support for reducing misinformation did correlate with respondent partisanship, such that Republicans were less supportive(r(1226)=-0.18, p<0.001; regression including controls for age, gender, education, and ethnicity: β=-0.17, t=-5.84, p<.001), even a substantial majority (67.2%) of strong Republicans believe social media platforms should try to reduce the spread of misinformation (Figure 1a). Thus, there is strong bipartisan support for interventions against misinformation.

In other words, stripped of culture war buzzwords, the vast majority of people want social media websites to intervene to slow the spread of misinformation (contrary to what you might hear out there). Second, the evidence pretty strongly shows that spreading misinformation is the leading indicator of why you might get banned by a social media platform.

So, even if more Republicans than Democrats end up getting banned, the evidence again suggests that it’s not anti-conservative bias at work, the issue is just that Republicans are significantly more likely to spread bullshit. If they stopped doing that, they wouldn’t face the same moderation pressures. You can find the whole study at this link or below.

Filed Under: anti-conservative bias, bias, content moderation, study
Companies: twitter

How Would Senator James Lankford React If A Democratic Senator Demanded Fox News Explain Its Editorial Policies?

from the intimidation-through-stupidity dept

A month ago, we wrote about a bizarre, nonsensical, Twitter rant from Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma that followed a bizarre, nonsensical appearance at the CPAC conference in which he lashed out at “big tech” for supposedly “censoring conservatives.” This fact-free grievance has been an item of blind faith among the Trumpist set, that big tech is somehow out to get them. The smart ones know it’s not true, but it plays well to the base, so they play it up. The dumb ones truly believe it, even as the evidence shows that Twitter and Facebook both have actually bent over backwards to give Republican politicians more leeway to violate the rules and not face any enforcement actions.

Still, a few weeks back, YouTube removed some videos from CPAC, not because of any anti-conservative bias, but for violating YouTube’s election integrity policy. You know what that means. YouTube has a policy that says you can’t mislead people about the election, and a bunch of Trumpists at CPAC whipped up the base into a frenzy with baseless conspiracy theories about the election.

Personally, I think YouTube should leave that content up. At some point, in the future, it’s going to be important to study the collective madness that has taken over much of the Republican party, causing it to completely throw out any semblance of principles, and start coasting on purely fictitious grievance culture wars, in which they must always be portrayed as the aggrieved victim. It would be nice to have a clear record of that.

However, YouTube has chosen to go in another direction and to actually enforce its policies, meaning a few such videos were removed. And, of course, this played right into the nonsense, fictitious grievance politics of the principle-less Republican Party, which sent out its derpiest politicians to whine about being censored.

Lankford, apparently, not humiliated enough by the nonsense he said on stage, has decided to double down, sending Google CEO Sundar Pichai a hilariously stupid letter, demanding to know why CPAC videos have been removed. The letter is like a greatest hits of wrongness and “that’s not how any of this works.” It accuses Google of censorship of conservative voices, it confuses Section 230, and asks all sorts of detailed questions about YouTube’s process that resulted in the videos being removed.

I could go through it bit by bit explaining how ridiculous each part of the letter is, but you can just read it yourself below and see.

But, just to demonstrate how ridiculous this letter is, all you have to do is replace “YouTube” with “Fox News” and replace any concept of “censorship of conservatives” with “failure to present liberal perspectives” and you might see how unhinged this letter is. I think if a Democratic Senator, say Elizabeth Warren or Amy Klobuchar, for example, sent a letter to Fox News saying:

It has come to my attention that Fox News recently refused to allow any liberal or Democratic commentators comment on Joe Biden’s performance, and did not provide any details why it is only presenting one side of the story concerning the federal government

And then demanding details on how Fox News goes about choosing what viewpoints are allowed to air, Senator Lankford, and tons of Republicans would absolutely freak out. And rightly so. No politician should be demanding to know the editorial decision making process of private media companies. To demand such information is a clear intimidation technique and should be seen as a violation of the 1st Amendment.

Senator Lankford has every right to spread nonsense, whether he believes it or not. But he doesn’t have the right, as a government official, to demand to know the editorial process of a private media company. Just as Senator Warren or Klobuchar should not and would not have the right to do the same for Fox News.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, anti-conservative bias, content moderation, editorial policies, election integrity, intimidation, james lankford, sundar pichai
Companies: google, youtube

GOP Claim That Biden FCC Nom Gigi Sohn Wants To 'Censor Conservatives' Is AT&T & Rupert Murdoch Backed Gibberish

from the fluff-and-nonsense dept

Mon, Dec 6th 2021 06:31am - Karl Bode

We’d already noted how telecom and media giants are hard at work trying to scuttle the nomination of consumer advocate Gigi Sohn to the FCC. Sohn is not only a genuine reformer, she’s broadly popular on both sides of the aisle in telecom and media circles. So companies like AT&T and News Corporation, which enjoyed no limit of ass kissing during the Trump era, are working overtime to come up with some feeble talking points loyal politicians can use to oppose her nomination. It’s not going well.

About the best they could come up with was the entirely false claim that Sohn wants to “censor Conservatives.” Anybody who actually knows Sohn knows the claim isn’t true, and she’s historically gone well out of her way to embrace policies that encourage diversity in media and speech, even when she doesn’t agree with the speaker. Despite being a nonsense claim, it has been broadly peppered across the right wing echo chamber, including the usual columns at Breitbart, editorials by the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board, Tucker Carlson, and elsewhere.

The claim popped up again at last week’s nomination hearing before a Senate Judiciary Committee courtesy of Senators Ted Cruz and Dan Sullivan:

“Federal Communications Commission nominee Gigi Sohn faced off against Republican senators at a nomination hearing yesterday, disputing the senators’ shaky claims that she would use a post at the FCC to censor conservatives. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) repeated arguments previously made by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and The Wall Street Journal editorial board, which mostly boil down to complaints about Sohn’s tweets criticizing Fox News and her criticism of Sinclair Broadcast Group.”

As we’ve long noted, the claims that Conservatives are being “censored” in general (either on the internet or on traditional television) aren’t remotely true. In fact Conservatives have not only built a massive right wing infotainment universe with a violent disdain for factual reality (OAN, NewsMax, Fox News, Breitbart, Facebook, YouTube, Blaze), they’ve mastered the art of trolling for outrage engagement, which generally involves saying inflammatory gibberish, then enjoying the added exposure from left-wing outrage retweets and ad-engagement obsessed clickbait coverage. Pretty much the exact opposite of “censorship.”

What’s usually deemed “censorship” is usually just fairly flimsy and short-lived accountability for spewing false or bigoted nonsense. And while the Trump GOP pretends to be mad at “big tech” for “censorship,” what they’re actually mad about is the fact that social media belatedly and inconsistently started reining in GOP race-baiting propaganda, a cornerstone of party power in the face of an unfavorable shift in demographics and a sagging electorate. The GOP has zero interest in genuine antitrust reform (see: forty straight years of U.S. history), but the pretense that they do provides handy cover for an agenda that’s exclusively self-serving.

The new Trump GOP is currently a party of performative gibberish, entirely untethered from reality, propped up largely thanks to propaganda shoveled into the brains of low-information voters, tricked into rooting against their best self interests via a massive, well-funded coalition of traditional cable and online companies (again, quite the opposite of “censorship”). And outside of perhaps reining in media consolidation and encouraging more competition, there’s not a whole lot the FCC can do about it from a policy perspective, given inevitable 1A challenges and a rightward-lurching Supreme Court. Even if Sohn wanted to “censor Conservatives” (which again, she doesn’t) she’d find it an impossible task within the confines of the FCC and legal reality.

The great irony in the GOP/News Corp/AT&T alliance’s effort to smear Sohn as somebody looking to “censor Conservatives?” Right wing news outlets like Newsmax and AT&T-funded OAN actually support her nomination because she’s historically worked to encourage diversity in media viewpoints and healthy competition in media markets. Sohn highlighted as much at the hearing:

“I would say, look at my record. Look at the conservative cable channels that I worked with for years to get them carriage on cable systems when those systems would not carry them. I have long worked with organizations and companies with whom I vigorously disagree on their point of view?fervent Republicans, fervent supporters of the previous president?and I worked with them to get their views online. I believe that I have been characterized very unfairly as being anti-conservative speech. I think my record says otherwise.”

It’s kind of hard to smear somebody as a fan of “conservative censorship” when outlets like OAN and Newsmax, which routinely traffic in truly repugnant garbage, say she’s always been even-handed when dealing with them. Check out this statement supporting Sohn by OAN President Charles Herring:

“She believes in the First Amendment and the advantages of a strong and open media for the benefit of our democracy. She is one of the most knowledgeable persons I know on FCC issues and has the common sense and desire to work with people on both sides of the aisle.”

As usual with the broader Trump GOP, this isn’t about policy, it’s about money and power. AT&T and News Corporation don’t want Sohn appointed because she’d not only break a 2-2 partisan gridlock in voting at the FCC, she actively supports holding telecom and media giants accountable for bad behavior. That’s in pretty stark contrast to the last four years of the Trump FCC, which basically involved coddling entrenched telecom and media giants at every conceivable opportunity, even if that required a whole lot of lying and legally dubious behavior.

If you’re a Trump-allied GOP lawmaker you can’t just come out and say you’re opposing Sohn’s nomination because you’re lodged up AT&T and Rupert Murdoch’s ass and the only thing you care about is protecting their revenues so campaign contributions keep flowing. So instead you glom on to the Trump GOP’s perpetual victimization complex to not only change the subject (away from the fact you’re an enabler of anti-competitive monopolists and have been for decades), but distract and agitate the base with false outrage and victimization porn. Sohn can be approved to the post without GOP support, so in the end most of this is little more than a delay tactic and empty calorie performative gibberish, much like the lion’s share of the modern Trump GOP policy platform.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, anti-conservative bias, fcc, gigi sohn, grandstanding, politics, ted cruz
Companies: newsmax, oan