Is Facebook Leaning Left, Right Or Just Going Nuts?
Social media is simply a platform on which netizens could express their opinions. No platform has been more frequently accused of being politically biased than Facebook. And there seems to be some confusion here. The left wing has accused it of blocking traffic to their news sites. The right wing has accused it of being biased against it. So if Facebook leaning left or is it leaning right?
I’m neither Left nor Right, but there is one thing that I can be sure of – Facebook is politically biased. Unlike Instagram, there is plenty of political opinions and discussion on Facebook and it seems to be that the folks at Facebook are trying way too hard to tone things down.
Let me share with you a quote which I read in a book about Fascism just yesterday:
“The receptivity of the masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan.”
Pretty harmless, don’t you think? It’s good to be reminded of the fact that politicians take advantage of our ignorance and forgetfulness all the time. It could apply to any politician in any society. As usual, I tried to share it on Facebook, but I made the mistake of crediting the one who said it. And that made all the difference. Facebook immediately pronounced my post “dangerous” and blocked me from posting, sharing or commenting for 24 hours. I can’t even like your post.
I’m sure the algorithm would have let me off if I had not credited some politicians’ secret mentor. The writing gurus often tell us not to underestimate the reader’s intelligence. Well, as a politician, you may have to take a different approach and if we know this dirty little secret, then we had better be well informed and set constant reminders. But no, Facebook’s algorithms consider that dangerous. Hence my title Is Facebook Leaning Left, Right Or Just Going Nuts?
Did I see all this coming? You bet. For the past 2 years, I have been getting a few of my posts (mostly opinion pieces on China and the coronavirus) “hidden” from other users. A couple of them were even blocked because they somehow constituted “hate speech”. As I’ve written here, the company could have been using every trick in the book, to the extent of staging a legal battle to try to weed out the “controversial” and potentially “offensive” stuff and it seems more than a little likely to me that Facebook or Meta are trying to get unblocked in China.
New Book!
