Where are the "Facebook Files?"

Mandel Ngan/Pool via AP

The Twitter Files have been…interesting.

Most of what we learned had been long suspected, but the release of the internal communications of the company laid bare how the censorship regime at the company worked.

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Airing it all out in the open is an undeniably good thing, even if the corporate media and the government have been downplaying or even denying the facts. Those of us who use social media to communicate or gather news need to know what is going on behind the scenes at these companies and whether they are being honest about what they are doing.

Social media, for good or ill, now helps to define the national agenda. It is where we go to gather information, to debate its meaning, and where the Elite™ sets the agenda and hashes it out. While most people are not Twitter fanatics, Twitter largely determines what gets reported and thus sets the national agenda in a very real way.

Facebook, on the other hand, is used by a vast number of people and is where a dominant number of people get their information. While not the favorite social media platform of Gen Z, most other demographic groups do obsessively use the platform. 70% of people say they use Facebook, and those people skew older, making them likelier voters.

And, according to the Pew Research center, vastly more people get their news from online sources than from TV these days. Facebook is a major source of that news. 86% get news online.

Yet while we have gotten some insight into how Twitter has distorted the delivery of information, Facebook is still mostly opaque in this regard. There are hints–such as Mark Zuckerberg’s admission that the FBI strongly influenced the company’s decision to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story, in the main we know little about how Facebook’s policies distort our news consumption.

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We do know that Facebook has “fact checkers” with a substantial Leftward tilt, and that in a court filing the company asserts that they are merely an expression of an opinion and not assertions of fact that themselves can be true or false. In defending themselves against a defamation lawsuit from John Stossel, Facebook asserted: “The labels themselves are neither false nor defamatory; to the contrary, they constitute protected opinion.” So Stossel has an opinion, and so do they. But if fact checks are just alternate opinions, why is Facebook pushing them on us, and why from Leftist sources?

You and I know why. What else are they doing?

Clearly Facebook is stacking the deck, but it would be very good to see how, precisely, they are doing so. In addition to fact checks, they can promote or demote posts on people’s timelines, suspend accounts, and ban people. Do they do so at the behest of government agencies? Do they get paid by the government to do so, as Twitter was?

This are important questions. At least on the latter question, Congress could find out.

They should. Subpoena them all. Let’s see the Facebook files.

 

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Ed Morrissey 12:40 PM | November 21, 2024
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David Strom 11:20 AM | November 21, 2024
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