The Manipulators

by Peter J. Hasson

  “Jones is undeniably an almost uniquely toxic figure. Slandering the Sandy Hook families by suggesting their dead children were nothing but ‘crisis actors’ was grotesque. And Jones has a long history of buffoonery, including but not limited to 9/11 trutherism. But I can’t support banning him from ostensibly content-neutral platforms, and those who refuse to see this as the first step toward a more aggressive campaign of de-platforming conservatives are being obtuse,” Washington Free Beacon editor Sonny Bunch wrote in an op-ed following Jones’ purge. “The math here is simple: There is a growing belief that speech can be considered violence, that racist speech is by definition violence and that conservative thought is inherently racist. I don’t need a whiteboard or lizard people to connect the dots.”55

  “So we’re now trusting the capitalist class, massive, unaccountable corporations, to decide on our behalf what we may listen to and talk about? This is the take-home message, the terrible take-home message, of the expulsion of Alex Jones’ Infowars network from Apple, Facebook, and Spotify and of the wild whoops of delight that this summary banning generated among so-called liberals: that people are now okay with allowing global capitalism to govern the public sphere and to decree what is sayable and what is unsayable. Corporate censorship, liberals’ new favourite thing—how bizarre,” British columnist Brendan O’Neill observed in Spiked magazine. “It doesn’t matter what you think of Jones. It doesn’t matter if you think he is mad, eccentric, and given to embracing crackpot theories about school shootings being faked. You should still be worried about what has happened to him because it confirms we have moved into a new era of outsourced censorship,” O’Neill added. “It shows that what was once done by the state is now done by corporations. The illiberal, intolerant cleansing from public life of ideas judged to be offensive or dangerous has shifted from being the state’s thing to being the business elite’s thing.”56

  “Facebook today exercises government-like powers of censorship despite the fact that it is a private company. The New York Times or the Wall Street Journal can in effect censor Alex Jones by refusing to carry his content. But because there is a pluralistic and competitive market in traditional print media, this doesn’t matter; Jones’s followers can simply choose different media outlets. The same is not true in today’s social media space,” American political scientist Francis Fukuyama wrote afterwards. “I personally find Alex Jones completely toxic and am not unhappy to see his visibility reduced; that will be good for our democracy. But I am also very uncomfortable with a private quasi-monopoly like Facebook making this kind of decision.”57

  But those who expressed concern about Jones’ ban were in the minority among the political and media class.

  Almost as soon as the Jones precedent was set, liberal activists and Democratic politicians demanded it be applied more broadly. Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut seized the opportunity to push Big Tech to go even further in their censorship. “Infowars is the tip of a giant iceberg of hate and lies that uses sites like Facebook and YouTube to tear our nation apart. These companies must do more than take down one website” Murphy wrote on Twitter. He insisted that the “survival of our democracy” depends on extreme censorship from Big Tech.58

  Steven Crowder

  To understand how the Jones formula will be applied, look at what happened to conservative comedian Steven Crowder. On May 30, 2019, Vox writer Carlos Maza, a former Media Matters staffer, posted a compilation of off-hand insults Crowder had directed at him across dozens of videos. “So, I have pretty thick skin when it comes to online harassment, but something has been really bothering me,” Maza began. “Since I started working at Vox, Steven Crowder has been making video after video ‘debunking’ Strikethrough [Maza’s video series]. Every single video has included repeated, overt attacks on my sexual orientation and ethnicity.” If Maza wanted to complain about Crowder calling him “lispy queer” and “gay Latino from Vox,” he would have been well within his rights to do so. The best way to counter speech you don’t like is more speech—not censorship. But Maza wasn’t looking to rebut Crowder—he was looking to silence him. Maza and like-minded journalists launched a full-blown advocacy campaign, demanding YouTube ban Crowder from the platform. YouTube originally ruled that Crowder’s videos didn’t violate its policies. After six days of lobbying from the media and liberal YouTube employees,59 YouTube demonetized Crowder’s channel.

  They’re Coming for Ben Shapiro

  If there’s one certainty in the digital speech battles, it’s this: the mob is going to come for Ben Shapiro. Ben is by far the most effective voice on the right. He bridges the gap between think-tank conservatism and populist conservatism better than anybody. Congressmen read his work and listen to his podcast—but so do the people outside the political world. I know D.C. insiders who listen to Ben’s podcast every day—and I know EMTs in Texas who do too. Ben reaches everybody—from the beltway to the border. That’s why the activist left is going to do everything they can to deplatform him. They’re already laying the groundwork with bad faith smear efforts.

  The Washington Post published an op-ed by Media Matters researcher Talia Lavin, who attacked Shapiro and others in a piece titled, “How the Far Right Spread Politically Convenient Lies about the Notre Dame Fire.” (Lavin, it’s worth noting, joined Media Matters after losing her fact-checking job at the New Yorker magazine for falsely accusing an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer of being a Nazi.60) In her Post op-ed, Lavin couldn’t actually point to any lies Shapiro told, but she claimed that some of his tweets mentioning Judeo-Christian values “evoked the specter of a war between Islam and the West that is already part of numerous far-right narratives.” Actually, Shapiro didn’t mention Islam at all in the tweets, but why let facts get in the way of a good narrative? After all, this isn’t about honestly assessing the facts—it’s about silencing the right’s most effective voices.

  In August 2019, Media Matters published a video compilation intended to portray Shapiro’s Daily Wire website as extremist. But Ben, knowing how Media Matters and other such outlets operate, was one step ahead of the smear artists. In July 2018, he posted an article on the Daily Wire titled, “So, Here’s A Giant List Of All The Dumb Stuff I’ve Ever Done (Don’t Worry, I’ll Keep Updating It).”61 In it, he listed everything—every comment, every article, every tweet—liberal hatchet men could try to use against him. He broke it down into four categories: “Stupid/Immoral Stuff I’ve Said (And Usually Retracted Multiple Times),” “Stuff The Left Is Taking Out Of Context,” “Stuff The Left Doesn’t Like That Happens To Be True,” and “Controversial Opinions That The Left Just Doesn’t Like.” It was a brilliant move, but it’s not going to be enough to keep left-wing activists from trying to—if not succeeding in—censoring him and the Daily Wire. Media Matters pays people to watch Ben’s daily podcast and selectively edit clips of his show to make him look bad.

  Change the Terms

  Six left-wing groups, spearheaded by the SPLC and the Center for American Progress (which is funded by liberal mega-donors like George Soros62), formed a pro-censorship coalition in October 2018. The coalition, “Change the Terms,” is trying to pressure all service-hosting tech companies into establishing rules against “hate speech”—not just on Facebook, Google, and Twitter, but on crowdfunding sites and website-hosting companies like GoDaddy. “Internet companies must do more to ensure that they are doing their part to combat extremism and hate, and take the threat of hate and extremism on their platforms more seriously,” the SPLC’s Heidi Beirich said in the announcement about the new censorship coalition. The SPLC pledged to hound social media platforms into compliance.

  “To ensure that companies are doing their part to help combat hateful conduct on their platforms, the SPLC and other organizations in this campaign will track the progress of major tech companies—especially social media platforms—to adopt and implement these model corporate policies. Then, in the following year, the organizations will provide
report cards to those companies on both their policies and their execution of the policies,” the SPLC’s announcement promised. The coalition demanded that all tech companies follow Google’s lead in establishing “trusted flaggers” to flag questionable individuals, organizations, and statements. More than that, they want tech companies to deny their platforms to people who engage in unacceptable off-platform behavior.63

  In other words, the SPLC and a variety of other left-wing groups want privileged access to Big Tech’s levers of power in order to police the off-platform behavior of their opponents. The terms also require tech companies to “establish a team of experts on hateful activities with requisite authority who will train and support programmers and assessors working to enforce anti-hateful activities, elements of the terms of service, develop training materials and programs, as well as create a means of tracking the effectiveness of any actions taken to respond to hateful activities.” The demand is essentially for tech companies to adopt the “anti-bias” teams now popular on college campuses. “Create a committee of outside advisers with expertise in identifying and tracking hateful activities who will have responsibility for producing an annual report on effectiveness of the steps taken by the company.” Big Tech already answers to the left-wing hacks at the SPLC, but the hacks want it guaranteed in writing.

  And give them this: it’s working. In late 2018 the fundraising site Patreon (used by Jordan Peterson and others) agreed to implement the recommendations of “Change the Terms.” Leftists then leapt into action identifying people that, according to them, were in violation of the new rules. It’s a shrewd play that they intend to replicate across platforms until the Internet resembles a giant MSNBC panel—with leftists and liberals facing off against a few milquetoast conservatives (the sort approved of by the New York Times and the Washington Post) who will be expected to agree with them.

  It’s about Power

  The fact that massive companies like Google and Facebook work with dishonest partisan hacks like Snopes and the SPLC shows how little they truly care about problems like misinformation and political extremism. It’s not about those things—it’s about power. That’s why progressives melt down anytime conservatives get close to any kind of influence within Big Tech: they know just how much damage you can inflict on your political enemies when working those crucial levers of power. That’s why left-wingers at Facebook have worked so furiously to try to push Joel Kaplan out of his job as a Facebook vice president, and why they’re intent on making sure Facebook only partners with third-party organizations that toe the left-wing line.

  In 2018, Facebook was slowly revamping its content policies, and in an effort to get conservative critics off its back, it hired Refiners, the public relations arm of the GOP opposition research firm America Rising. Refiners pointed out to conservative media that several groups criticizing Facebook were funded by left-wing billionaire George Soros.64 That was true, but it was also inconsequential: were conservatives really supposed to stop criticizing Facebook for its anti-conservative bias just because Soros-funded activists were also criticizing Facebook? In reality, what Facebook had accomplished was sidelining the premier Republican opposition research firm from being one of its critics. Meanwhile, the Soros-backed Media Matters complained that Facebook wasn’t being left-wing enough and launched a petition that demanded that the Weekly Standard be dropped as a fact-checker for the platform, because the high-brow (and establishment Republican, anti-Trump) magazine was allegedly a “right-wing publication with a history of partisan lies.”65 The petition asserted that “Facebook has no place partnering with the outlet to provide neutral and independent analysis.” To Media Matters, left-wing outlets like Snopes are nonpartisan, but center-right outlets like the Weekly Standard are “right-wing” and untrustworthy, despite being independent enough to be enormously critical of Trump.

  Media Matters no doubt felt vindicated when the Weekly Standard fact-checked and dinged the Soros-backed left-wing blog ThinkProgress. During the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, ThinkProgress published an article titled “Brett Kavanaugh Said He Would Kill Roe v. Wade Last Week and Almost No One Noticed.” The headline is pretty much what the article argued, but it didn’t actually include any evidence of Kavanaugh saying he would overturn the Supreme Court ruling. The Standard’s fact-check labeled the claim “false,” and ThinkProgress writers proceeded to have a meltdown, as did most of the liberal media establishment.

  But William Saletan, writing at Slate.com, made a crucial observation:

  So the Standard’s fact check is correct. By itself, that’s a small point. But ThinkProgress and its allies have made the dispute into something much bigger. By attacking the fact check as biased on the grounds that a conservative magazine published it, they’ve proved the opposite of what they intended. They’ve confirmed that the press is full of left-leaning journalists who sometimes can’t see or acknowledge congenial falsehoods, and they’ve demonstrated how these journalists unite, when challenged, in a tribal chorus to accuse conservatives of trying to “censor” them. In sum, they’ve demonstrated why we need conservative journalists to help check facts.66

  That is obviously true, but within much of Big Tech and certainly within the liberal media establishment it is also controversial because neither one really cares about neutral reporting or an honest assessment of the facts. They care much more about advancing an ideological narrative. It is about politics; it is about power; and the left does not want its media dominance challenged.

  CHAPTER EIGHT The Narrative

  The establishment liberal media has a huge incentive to control or be the biggest player on social media. The digital revolution has made some of the traditional media’s functions irrelevant. People don’t need to buy a newspaper or watch the evening news to find out what tomorrow’s weather will be. They can check the weather on their phones within three seconds. People no longer need to buy classified ads in a newspaper. They can do the same on Craigslist for free or next to nothing. Social media companies present a direct threat to establishment media companies by eating up consumers’ attention (attention that could be directed towards MSNBC or CNN) and the ad revenue that comes with it. And even then, establishment media companies are at a disadvantage.

  Because tech companies constantly vacuum up your data, advertisers can target highly specific demographics on social media platforms. That advantage is crucial. Buying time on MSNBC allows companies to advertise to people who watch Rachel Maddow. But buying ads on Twitter or Facebook allows them to target the specific subset of Rachel Maddow fans who are most likely to buy their products. Newspapers, cable networks, and digital media companies simply can’t compete with that ad model. The best they can do is try to succeed within it—or play dirty.

  The digital advertising market falls into two categories: 1) Google and Facebook 2) everybody else. Google and Facebook together account for nearly 60 percent of the digital advertising market.1 Massive amounts of money are at stake: by 2023, the digital advertising industry is projected to be worth $230 billion—that’s billion, with a “b.”2 And establishment media companies feel entitled to Big Tech’s ad revenue. Not only that, they also demand that Big Tech prevent conservative media outlets from profiting off their platform. The size of the digital advertising market is crucial context in considering corporate media companies’ coverage of Google and Facebook. Media coverage of widespread misinformation or “hate speech” on tech platforms inflicts damage on Google and Facebook’s ad revenue. The solution always involves Big Tech giving Big Media a greater market share.

  In June 2019, the New York Times, for example, hammered Google News with a story that bordered on propaganda. The story was headlined: “Google Made $4.7 Billion from the News Industry in 2018, Study Says,” and made the case that Google was a leech on traditional news media.3 The story was, however, egregiously misleading. Columbia Journalism Review writer Mathew Ingram noted, “As it turns out, the report was publis
hed by the News Media Alliance, a media-industry lobby group formerly known as the Newspaper Association of America, and the figure quoted by the Times—without any critical assessment whatsoever—appears to be based almost entirely on questionable mathematical extrapolation from a comment made by a former Google executive more than a decade ago.”4

  The News Media Alliance, the special interest group behind the junk study, was at the same time lobbying in favor of a law exempting print and online media companies from antitrust regulations. Among the special interest group’s members: the New York Times. The paper’s garbage article “was timed in such a way as to provide maximum publicity for a bill that the New Media Alliance has been promoting to Congress, called the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act,” Ingram observed. The bill “would allow print and online news companies to cartelize into a united front against Google and Facebook…. Under the new law, which would sunset in four years, the cartel could collectively withhold content from Google, Facebook and other sites and negotiate the terms under which the two tech giants could use their work. Anti-trust law currently prohibits such industrywide collusion,” noted Politico’s Jack Shafer.5 In other words, the Times made a lobbying pitch, disguised as a news article, based on shoddy data from a special interest group whose members include the Times, for a bill that would benefit the paper’s interests. It was a gross move—but illuminating in demonstrating how establishment media’s business interests are intertwined with their coverage of Big Tech.