The Washington Post published a story last week that blames Facebook for – it says – aiding and abetting rioters who took over the U.S. Capitol on January 6th by amplifying conservative posts. Facebook employees watched in horror, writes the Post, as rioters that organized on their platform stormed the Capitol to stop electoral votes from being tallied. "Measures of online mayhem surged alarmingly on Facebook, with user reports of 'false news' hitting nearly 40,000 per hour, an internal report that day showed," reports the Post.
Dan Gainor of MRC TechWatch says the Left saw its opportunity to hold Facebook's feet to the fire after a supposed whistleblower released reams of documents (now dubbed "The Facebook Papers") allegedly detailing the social media giant's complicity and cooperation in the riot with conservative organizations – including Gainor's own Media Research Center.
"What the Left is trying to do is insidious," he begins. "They're trying to use all this massive dump of information as a way to go after Facebook. Why? Because Facebook didn't do what they wanted it to do. They want Facebook to ban us entirely."
But Gainor says the liberal beef with Facebook goes back much further. "They've been mad at Facebook since 2016. They blamed Facebook for Trump winning – because Trump was very popular on Facebook. [But] Trump was popular on Twitter and elsewhere," he points out.
Gainor contends liberals also hate Facebook for another reason: the top, most-popular posts and traffic typically lead to conservative outlets like Breitbart, Dan Bongino, and the like. They don't understand it, according to the MRC spokesman, and say Facebook's algorithms were written to amplify, not censor, those voices.
"It never occurs to them [that] maybe people just want to read that stuff; that maybe conservatives went online to social media sites because the other stuff was always so biased ….
"Nah, that never occurs to them," Gainor concludes.
