Facebook Is a Right-Wing Company, Part One Million
Peter Thiel is Big Tech’s most prominent Trump supporter. He is an unabashed enemy of the free press, having covertly funded a lawsuit that bankrupted Gawker three years ago. He has become one of the most vocal pro-monopoly advocates,
taking a lonely stand in defense of Silicon Valley’s much-maligned
mega-corporations. He has channeled his immense wealth into projects
that promise total surveillance of everyone and immortality
for the super-rich. And he has become Facebook founder Mark
Zuckerberg’s most trusted adviser during the most turbulent period in
the social network’s history.
On Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal reported
that Thiel, a longtime Facebook board member, had become Zuckerberg’s
consigliere. With the company’s leadership under fire for its refusal to vet political advertisements’ veracity or limit advertisers’ ability to target ads—in contrast to Google and Twitter,
which have taken steps to crack down on misleading content—Thiel has
encouraged the embattled Facebook CEO “not to bow to public pressure.”
The Journal noted that Thiel was “extending his influence while the company’s board and senior ranks are in flux.”
Once
quiet, Thiel’s influence over Facebook has grown louder as the company
has tried to navigated a succession of scandals and seen its popularity
plummet. His values are driving Facebook as the company doubles down on
policies that empower demagogues and despots and disempower the rest of
us.
Hauled before the House Judiciary Committee
earlier this year to address the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Zuckerberg
made the case that his company cared deeply about making the world a
better place. “Facebook is an idealistic and optimistic company,” he said.
“For most of our existence, we focused on all the good that connecting
people can bring.” Zuckerberg and his allies then went on a public
relations blitz to convince an increasingly skeptical public that
Facebook had learned its lesson.
The rebranding campaign made a warm and fuzzy appeal:
Facebook is where you look at pictures of puppies and babies. It’s
where you can stay connected with loved ones, wherever they may be. But
in private, the company was embracing Thiel’s conservative values.
Much
of this has come out via the company’s shifting relationship with the
media. Last year, Facebook empowered former Republican Senator Jon Kyl
to investigate the conservative claim that Facebook, like other Silicon Valley tech companies, was suppressing speech from the right. Like a similar partnership
with the Heritage Foundation, the move may have been intended to
bolster the company’s credibility with conservatives. But it backfired,
with Kyl blasting the company for not taking conservatives’ concerns about speech seriously, even though those concerns had little to no basis.
Then,
in October, Facebook launched a partnership with a number of news
outlets. Facebook had become synonymous with the “fake news” problem,
and its response was to empower legitimate outlets by launching Facebook
News, a tab on its mobile app. But one of Facebook’s new partners was Breitbart, the alt-right hub that regularly publishes racist stories. As The Verge’s Casey Newton noted
at the time, “Breitbart was included in the tab precisely for
ideological reasons. … Certainly no one at Facebook seems to be
suggesting that Breitbart is a reliable producer of high-quality
journalism—the argument seems to be rather that it would be poor form to
exclude them just because they once (for example) tagged relevant
stories with the label ‘black crime.’”
Meanwhile,
Zuckerberg’s public rhetoric has gotten more MAGA. He now makes a
nationalistic argument on behalf of Facebook: Empower us, or cede ground
to China. Defending the company’s digital currency Libra before
Congress this summer, Zuckerberg said,
“I believe that if America does not lead innovation in the digital
currency and payments area, others will. If we fail to act, we could
soon see a digital currency controlled by others whose values are
dramatically different.”
As it happens, Thiel has been one of Silicon Valley’s leading anti-China voices, arguing
in August that Google was helping the country “gain an intelligence
advantage” and “penetrate defenses in the relatively new theater of
cyberwarfare.”
In October, Zuckerberg delivered a new
manifesto for Facebook. While he continued to claim the company was
about bringing people together, he also made a free speech absolutist
case in defense of his life’s work. “I am here today because I believe
we must continue to stand for free expression,” he told
an audience at Georgetown University. Facebook, in this telling, could
not police its platform out of principle. It could not rid itself of
hate speech and manipulative political advertisements aimed at promoting
right-wing candidates, even if it wanted to. “I don’t think it’s right
for a private company to censor politicians in a democracy,” he said.
For
years, Facebook’s public relations team have tried to present Mark
Zuckerberg not as the ruthless billionaire he is, but as a compassionate
and curious young man seeking to understand the world around him. That
has changed over the past year and a half. Facebook has, as many have
noted, always been a covertly right-wing company, “hostage to
conservative ideas about economics and speech,” as Jacob Silverman wrote in The Baffler. Thanks to Thiel’s influence, it has increasingly become an overtly right-wing one.
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