A few weeks ago I wrote about the campaign against Facebook launched by Frances Haugen. I thought it was a liberal psychological operation aimed at getting Facebook to censor more conservatives and hire more American intel operatives.
This has been building, successively, ever the twin shocks of Brexit and Donald Trump. “Make no mistake, 2016 will never happen again,” wrote historian Niall Ferguson at the time.
And it didn’t! Social-media networks promoted false stories that made Donald Trump look bad relentlessly. And they outright censored true stories that made Joe Biden look bad. Zuckerberg gave millions to the cause of Democratic victories.
Now, of course, the phrase “liberal psyop” is the sort of thing that would cause me to walk away from anyone who uttered it. But what else could you call that dramatic rollout on 60 Minutes, in the Wall Street Journal, and immediately into Congress?
And that’s what it is. The Democrat-aligned Washington PR firm that is handling the “Facebook Whistleblower” is getting money for this campaign from liberal mega donor Pierre Omidyar. That’s the man who funds The Intercept, and a constellation of organizations associated with Never-Trump conservatives.
We’re currently on to phase No. 2, “The Facebook Papers,” which is leading Twitter’s trending topics as I write this. You can read through and all you’ll find is that many progressive Facebook employees and executives objected strongly to conservatives’ using Facebook during an election year, and argued for more censorship and intervention against them, only to be rebuffed by the CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. There’s no attempt to situate these in the broader problem of social-media radicalization, which played a role in the 2020 riots that swept the United States, or that plays a role in social contagions such as the transgender phenomenon.
There is also almost no attempt to understand or distinguish what people do and say that is merely made visible by Facebook, from what people do and say because of Facebook’s design and algorithms.
Anyway, it will be interesting to see whether people fall for this attempt to recreate an institutional liberal stranglehold over media.