The Manipulators Read online

  Facebook NewsFeed

  In January 2018, Zuckerberg announced two key changes to Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm that together would boost a “trusted” minority of news outlets while suppressing their competitors. First, Facebook would slash news articles’ share of the newsfeed from 5 percent to 4 percent in the coming months. Second, Facebook would boost certain “trusted” news outlets and suppress other sources that it determined less trustworthy. At the time, Facebook said that trustworthiness would be determined by a simple two-question poll: whether a user had heard of a publication, and whether they trusted it. That turned out not to be the case.

  While speaking at a tech conference in February 2018, Facebook executive Campbell Brown indicated that Facebook would boost “quality” news sources, even if they didn’t have widespread name recognition (and thus polled poorly in Facebook’s two-question poll). “So much of the best journalism today is being done by smaller, more niche, more focused journalists who aren’t gonna have the brand recognition,” Brown said. “To me, this is the future of journalism. This is where the experts are gonna be.” Brown, herself a former NBC and CNN anchor, said Facebook was now going to have a “point of view” towards the news. In other words, the poll was just a cover for boosting the outlets Facebook wanted to boost, whether they polled well or not. “This is us changing our relationship with publishers and emphasizing something that Facebook has never done before: It’s having a point of view, and it’s leaning into quality news,” Brown said of the newsfeed changes. She added that Facebook is “taking a step to try to define what quality news looks like and give that a boost.”29

  Not surprisingly, Facebook’s algorithm changes overwhelmingly benefited establishment liberal media outlets. In April 2018, NewsWhip—one of the most respected, non-partisan, social media analytics companies—reported: “The changes could be divided into two fairly distinct camps: engagement boosts for mainstream news outlets such as CNN and NBC, and declines for smaller, politically-focused sites and entertainment publishers.”30 NewsWhip noted that “of the top ten most engaged sites in March [2018], eight were legacy news outlets. Looking at individual sites, it’s clear that some names, namely CNN, the New York Times, The Guardian, BBC News, and the Washington Post, all posted dramatic increases in their interaction counts…. Increases of this magnitude had not been seen in a long time.” And who were the losers? The digital companies giving the establishment media a run for their money. “If large mainstream news sites with TV or print arms were the big winners in terms of engagement and attention last month, their most prominent digital rivals of the last few years were the losers. In particular, smaller political news sites and entertainment or viral outlets saw their engagement diminish.”

  The algorithm changes disproportionately harmed right-of-center publishers, tech website The Outline concluded in a lengthy report earlier in March 2018. The Outline’s analysis found that “conservative and right-wing publishers (such as Breitbart, Fox News, and Gateway Pundit) were hit the hardest in the weeks following the announcement, with Facebook engagement totals for February dropping as much as 55 percent for some, while the engagement numbers of most predominantly liberal publishers remained unaffected.”31 Conservative website Western Journalism reached the same conclusion in its own analysis published the same month: conservative websites saw a significant drop in traffic from Facebook following the algorithm change, while comparable liberal sources saw a slight increase.32 Facebook’s series of post-election changes damaged many media outlets on the right, and destroyed two of them.

  Independent Journal Review, or IJR, was a major player in the conservative media world in 2016 and 2017. It was the first outlet to report that Trump had picked Neil Gorsuch to serve on the Supreme Court. It got another major scoop with exclusive access to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on his first trip to Asia. In a March 2017 piece for Business Insider, Oliver Darcy, now at CNN, described IJR as a “powerhouse.”33 That was then. Now, IJR is essentially a non-player in the media world. Facebook’s algorithm changes to start off 2018 neutered IJR’s traffic, leaving the outlet a skeleton of what it once was.34 Before February 2018 was over, the company cleaned house with mass layoffs.35

  News and culture website Rare went from being a popular conservative media outlet, to being gutted and sold after Facebook’s algorithm changes. The website’s traffic fluctuated in 2017, in part because Facebook’s newly hired content monitors erroneously classified Rare as an “ad farm” without informing the site. It was only when Rare reached out to Facebook in October 2017 that the site was able to find out what the hell was going on with its traffic. By November 2017, the error had been corrected and Rare’s traffic returned, former Rare writer Matt Naham recounted.36 “Then January 2018 happened.” Rare’s traffic plummeted once again, except this time it stayed there. Rare informed staffers on March 1, 2018, that they would all be unemployed by the end of the month.37 But Facebook was just getting started.

  Three months later, in May 2018, Zuckerberg elaborated on how the boosting and suppression of certain media outlets was—and is—taking place: “We put [that data] into the system, and it is acting as a boost or a suppression, and we’re going to dial up the intensity of that over time,” he told BuzzFeed. “We feel like we have a responsibility to further [break] down polarization and find common ground.”38 It’s important to note that when Facebook executives talk about “breaking down political polarization,” they’re talking about manipulating their algorithms to sway people’s political perspectives. And when they talk about politically polarized Americans, they aren’t talking about liberals. The hivemind in Facebook doesn’t see left-wingers as polarized—after all, the vast majority of their employees find common ground in left-wing politics. They see the people who reject left-wing politics as polarized and in need of correction. That’s who they believe were the problem in 2016, and that’s who they’re trying to change. Thus, “ending polarization” does not mean moving each side slightly in the other’s direction; it means moving everyone on the right to the left. If not for pushback from Kaplan, Facebook would already have implemented an algorithm change inserting opposing views into certain users’ feeds.39 Unsurprisingly, the proposed plan would have overwhelmingly targeted conservative users.40 The program was a blatant attempt by Facebook to ram CNN and HuffPost articles down the throats of people who don’t want to read them. When Facebook talks about breaking down “polarization,” this is what the company means: prescribing liberal thoughts to cure conservatives of their conservatism.

  It also means the perpetuation of the establishment media monoculture. Facebook in 2019 began rolling out an entirely new section of the site—Facebook News—for a handpicked set of media outlets. Some of them would be paid — big league. The Wall Street Journal reported in August 2019 that Facebook had proposed million-dollar partnerships to establishment media companies.41 “The outlets pitched by Facebook on its news tab included Walt Disney Co.’s ABC News, Wall Street Journal parent Dow Jones, the Washington Post, and Bloomberg,” the Journal reported. Campbell Brown, the CNN anchor–turned Big Tech executive, officially introduced Facebook News to the public on October 25, 2019. At the top of the “key features” section: “Today’s Stories” which would be “chosen by a team of journalists”—working for Facebook—“to catch you up on the news throughout the day.” That is: the news you see on Facebook would now be hand-selected by Facebook.

  The new feature effectively created three tiers of media outlets on Facebook. The top tier—as designated by Facebook’s left-wing workforce—not only received access to the news tab and first choice for the “Today’s Stories” section, they also received access to Facebook’s wallet. The second tier would have access to the new feature—but they wouldn’t be paid for it. And the third tier was shut out altogether. Facebook is paying some of the favored outlets as much as $3 million per year.42 The company noted that Breitbart News was among the outlets whose articles would be included in Faceboo
k News, though not directly paid for it like Facebook’s favorites would be. Establishment journalists seethed that Breitbart made it into the second tier, instead of being barred from Facebook News through and through.

  “Experts assail: If Breitbart is ‘high quality’ news, what’s low?” wrote CNN’s Oliver Darcy, noting that he “reached out to some experts in the journalism field to ask them what they thought of Facebook’s decision. None were supportive.”43 The three “experts” Darcy cited were: a left-wing Columbia University professor, a Washington Post blogger and MSNBC contributor Charlie Sykes. The editor in chief of The Daily Beast, a liberal website, accused Facebook of “embracing a political ideology” by allowing Breitbart into the second tier.44 Charlie Warzel, a liberal columnist at the New York Times, devoted an entire column to raking Facebook over the coals for Breitbart’s inclusion.45

  The left-wing rage at Facebook, if anything, was helpful to the company. Left-wingers insisting Facebook’s bias didn’t go far enough distracted from just how far the company had gone. Facebook is no longer a free and open platform — it’s a platform explicitly designed to give a leg up to specific outlets. A sliver of the right-of-center media world made the cut, in order to present a cheap claim to fairness. They let Facebook pretend as if it’s at all politically neutral. It’s not permanent safety, either. They’re at Facebook’s mercy—and Facebook will face greater and greater pressure from the left to kick right-of-center outlets further down the ladder.

  It’s worth noting the way in which Facebook has overhauled its platform: gradually. Since the 2016 election, the play for Silicon Valley has been to slow-walk content changes that have massive political implications, while insisting with a straight face that there are no political implications to those changes. There’s a tremendous upside to handling the process that way: changes receive the most attention when they’re announced, allowing Facebook to dismiss critics as conspiracy theorists—after all, the platform looks largely the same as the day before. Then, as suspicion and scrutiny fade, Facebook can slowly but surely “dial up” the manipulation. Step by step, in reaction to one election and in preparation for another, Facebook will have dramatically overhauled how news is consumed on its platform, and particularly which news outlets most people see: the outlets that favor the establishment left.

  “Facebook is kind of like the world’s newsstand. Imagine if one company owned all the newsstands in America and decided that some newspapers couldn’t be available in any stand in America, I think people would have a huge speech problem with that, and that’s essentially what’s going on now,” is how reporter Allum Bokhari described Facebook’s overhaul of its platform to me.

  Facebook would punish content that doesn’t break the rules (but that Facebook monitors don’t like), pay and promote liberal publishers through Facebook News, and, most of all, single-out conservatives for special negative treatment.

  Any time Facebook makes a change to its content policies, conservative voices end up worse off for it. It’s not a coincidence that Facebook’s “mistakes” always target the liberal establishment’s opponents. Consider a few examples:

  Franklin Graham

  Facebook suspended the Reverend Franklin Graham in December 2018 for a two-year-old post about transgender bathrooms. The 2016 post advocated for a proposed North Carolina law requiring persons, including people who identify as transgender, to use the bathroom of their biological sex. Graham argued the law would “prevent men from being able to use women’s restrooms and locker rooms.” He thought that was a common-sense good thing to do. But it was too much for one of Facebook’s content monitors, who reviewed the post after someone—it’s unclear who—flagged the two-year-old Facebook post for hate speech. Facebook’s content reviewer agreed, ruling that the post was in violation of Facebook’s rules against “dehumanizing language.”46 After a backlash from conservative users, Facebook issued an apology to Graham and said the suspension was an error.47 “Facebook is censoring free speech,” Graham reflected afterwards. “They’re making and changing the rules. Truth is truth. God made the rules and His Word is truth. The free exchange of ideas is part of our country’s DNA.”48

  “Men Can’t Be Women”

  Facebook suspended right-wing British writer Raheem Kassam in May 2019 for challenging the left-wing position on transgender issues. Kassam’s original post, from 2008, said “men can’t be women.”49 He re-shared the post eleven years later in 2019, adding: “How did I know all this trans shit was coming, eleven years ago?” Facebook suspended him for a week. “This is because you’ve previously posted something that didn’t follow our Community Standard,” Facebook informed him. “This post goes against our standards on hate speech, so no one else can see it.”50

  #BuildThatWall

  Facebook flagged a post honoring slain California police officer Ronil Singh.51 The post noted that Singh, a legal immigrant, was murdered in the line of duty by an illegal immigrant. “This is precisely why we need to #buildthatwall,” the post said. Facebook deleted the post until the Daily Caller News Foundation inquired about its deletion.52

  A Rabbi Walks onto a Train with Anti-Semites

  Big Tech’s rigid adherence to progressive ideology explains why the censorship and suppression invariably skews against certain groups and in favor of others. New York Rabbi Avram Mlotek learned this lesson firsthand. Just days after an antisemite murdered eleven people at a Pittsburgh synagogue, Mlotek was riding the train home when he found himself on the receiving end of vicious antisemitism. He recounted the frightening experience in a lengthy Facebook post:

  “You a Jew, man?” I was asked on a crowded uptown B train headed home. “I am, brother,” I replied. “You a real Jew, man?” he pressed. “I try,” I answered. “Blacks are Jews, man,” he said. “Yes, Jews come in all colors, brother,” I said. “Nah, I’m a real Jew,” he said, “You’re an impostor.” I stopped engaging at this point while this man told me repeatedly that Israel was not mine, that I was a fraud, and that Jews are responsible for the mess we find ourselves in today in the city of New York and all over the world. He then lifted up a picture of Louis Farrakhan and asked, “You know who this is?” I didn’t answer. He kept asking and asked louder. “Yes,” I said, “that’s an anti-semite.” “No,” he said, “that’s a real Jew. You’re a fu*king fake.” At this point another man on the subway said, “He ain’t gonna take your bait.” The first man then said, “Yeah, brother. Black power.” The second man about me, “He a photo-copy” and lifted up his fist in the Black power symbol. The first man went on: “And a bunch of them are gays. Fu*king faggots. You gonna get off this subway stop, man?” “I’m going to go home to my wife and kids,” I said. “Yeah, you a cocks*cker,” he said. “Have a blessed night,” I said as I got off the train. On a crowded subway home, no one besides a second man who seemingly held similar ideologies said anything.

  Rabbi Mlotek’s post was a horrifying, eye-opening example of anti-Semitism in America. Yet Facebook deleted it for allegedly violating “community standards.” Since antisemitism in New York comes largely from the far left,53 one has to wonder what those “community standards are. Facebook didn’t restore the post until Aaron Bandler, a reporter with the Jewish Journal, asked about the removal. After Bandler’s inquiry, the social media company restored the post, which it said was “mistakenly” deleted. The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, HuffPost, and BuzzFeed combined to write a grand total of zero articles about Facebook censoring a rabbi who reported antisemitic harassment. Fox News was the only prominent national media outlet to cover the story at all, after the Jewish Journal broke the news. If the Jewish outlet hadn’t reached out to Facebook, would it have ever restored Rabbi Mlotek’s post? It’s hard to picture. And that’s a disturbing thought.

  Facebook Election Ads

  Facebook’s enforcement of its rules on political advertisements in the 2018 election was one-sided and selective, as well. Facebook dinged an ad from
President Trump about illegal immigration because it allegedly violated Facebook’s policy against “sensational content.” Yet the social media giant had no issue with left-wing billionaire Tom Steyer running political ads that explicitly compared the president to mass-murdering tyrants like Saddam Hussein, Hugo Chavez, and Kim Jong Un.54 Sensational content isn’t “sensational” if Facebook’s speech police agree with it.

  Facebook also pledged to combat misinformation in its political advertisements, but it had no reservations about accepting the North Dakota Democratic Party’s targeted advertisements containing blatant misinformation meant to trick hunters—a group more likely to vote Republican—into sitting out the election. The party created a Facebook page called “Hunter Alerts,” designed to look like an apolitical informational page for hunters. The Democrats then bought ads for “Hunter Alerts” that advised hunters not to vote: “ATTENTION HUNTERS: If you vote in North Dakota, you may forfeit hunting licenses you have in other states. If you want to keep your out-of-state hunting licenses, you may not want to vote in North Dakota.” The claim was indisputably false, but Facebook only flagged the ads after the Democratic Party discontinued them in the face of public pressure.

  Following the 2018 midterm elections, I identified hundreds of misleading Facebook advertisements in which left-wing operatives posed as disgruntled conservatives and encouraged Republicans not to vote in the elections.55 American Engagement Technologies (AET), founded by former Obama administration official Mikey Dickerson, bought ads for two Facebook pages, “The Daily Real” and “Today’s Nation,” that encouraged Republican voters to stay home in the midterm elections. Both pages were apparently designed to give the impression that they were operated by frustrated conservatives rather than by Democratic operatives. The American flag-adorned pages encouraged conservative voters to either stay home in November or vote for Democrats to punish Republicans for being insufficiently conservative. Other ads called polls predicting a “blue wave” in the 2018 elections “unreliable” and downplayed the election’s importance. The misleading ads collectively garnered millions of impressions. While reporting the story, I asked Facebook whether the misleading political advertisements violated its rules, but only received a response two days after I published the story, at which point Facebook spokesman Devon Kearns assured me that he was “looking into this,” but “unfortunately” he wouldn’t have a response in time for my deadline (which Facebook had already missed). I replied that regardless of the timing of the company’s answer, I would still appreciate a response whenever he could offer clarification on the misleading ads. Despite repeated follow-ups, Kearns never got back to me. Draw your own conclusions.