I distinctly remember taking part in an online discussion several years ago where one of the interlocutors warned me what would happen if Google ever became an evil monopoly. I couldn’t help but think to myself, have you not been paying attention? Leaving aside its extensive invasions of privacy, its intense cooperation with the largest dictatorship on the planet, as well as its agreements with more benighted countries which might or might not censor blasphemous search results, there is the pervasive ideological bias which infects this corporation and periodically makes itself known through heavy-handed editorial and advertising decisions.
However, a corporation which finds itself even more powerful than Google in terms of shaping the public debate is Facebook. Thanks to Gizmodo, we now know that the militant opposition to Donald Trump among Mark Zuckerberg and his minions was simply the tip of the iceberg, and that Facebook employees had purposefully manipulated their site’s Trending Topics feature in order to suppress conservative views. Discrimination against non-bien pensant views-including opposition to open borders, multiculturalism, firearms abolition, and using the Constitution as a leftist version of Mad Libs-is encoded in Facebook’s DNA.
In order to grasp just how pervasive this sort of viewpoint discrimination is, one need only look at the case of Lauren Southern, who was banned from Facebook for critiquing Facebook’s tendency to delete outspoken, non-leftist accounts. It’s interesting how liberals lament epistemic closure while simultaneously overlooking the stranglehold not only old but new media exercise over acceptable public debate, restricting the Overton Window to a range of issues that appeal to a small class of opinion-makers, even as forces that are transforming Western civilization are studiously ignored by the gatekeepers of permissible discourse.
Those on the left willing to admit that this is a problem are few and far between, which shouldn’t surprise you considering the fact that even ostensible conservatives can’t wait to grovel before power. Milo, as usual, has a great write-up of the Potemkin conservatives meeting with Zuck, which I recommend reading in its entirety. This is a multi-front war, where we face enemies both internally and externally, and the only way we’re going to begin to make progress is through relentless honesty, regardless of how limited our options for dissemination of the truth might be.
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