by Ben Shapiro
There was only one problem.
It wasn’t true.
In reality, as Covington Catholic student Nick Sandmann—the kid in the MAGA hat—stated, the white students were accosted by four black members of the Black Hebrew Israelites—a radical group of nut cases who had called them “racists,” “bigots,” “faggots,” and “incest kids.” The students were also accosted by the Native American man, who strode into their group and began banging a drum in their faces. Sandmann stood still, smiling awkwardly. As Sandmann related:
I was not intentionally making faces at the protestor. I did smile at one point because I wanted him to know that I was not going to become angry, intimidated or be provoked into a larger confrontation. I am a faithful Christian and practicing Catholic, and I always try to live up to the ideals my faith teaches me—to remain respectful of others, and to take no action that would lead to conflict or violence.60
Sandmann was telling the truth. Nearly every element of the story as reported by the establishment media was false. “[T]he elite media have botched the story so completely that they have lost the authority to report on it,” wrote Caitlyn Flanagan of The Atlantic. Flanagan went further, slamming The New York Times: “You were partly responsible for the election of Trump because you are the most influential newspaper in the country, and you are not fair or impartial. Millions of Americans believe you hate them and that you will casually harm them.”61
Nothing has changed.
If anything, the problem has grown worse.
The establishment media have declared themselves the heroes of the past four years—the bravest, the most noble, the guardians of our democracy. They weren’t, and they aren’t. They are willing to attack everyone from commoners to kings to advance their agenda. Doubt them, and they’ll cast you out. Compete with them, and they’ll work to silence you.
Within days of Joe Biden’s ascension to the White House, our JournalismingTM experts reverted from watchdogs to lapdogs. CNN’s Dana Bash swooned, “The adults are back in the room.”62 CNN’s White House reporter Jim Acosta tweeted a picture of himself with NBC News’ Peter Alexander: “Just a couple of guys covering the White House on the last full day of Trump admin. Think we will finally have time for that drink now @PeterAlexander?”63 CNN’s Brian Stelter, host of the ironically named Reliable Sources, wrote a glowing chyron about White House press secretary (and former CNN contributor) Jen Psaki’s assurance that she would only speak truth: “Psaki promises to share ‘accurate info’ (how refreshing).”64 Margaret Sullivan of The Washington Post praised the “Biden White House’s return to normalcy,” and warned against media members being too harsh on the new administration.65
It’s all fine. Trust them.
This is dangerous stuff. It’s dangerous that the guardians of our democracy—the media—aren’t guardians but political activists, dedicated to their own brand of propaganda. It’s even more dangerous that they now work on an ongoing basis to stymie voices with whom they disagree, and use the power of their platforms to destroy their opponents at every level. A thriving marketplace of ideas requires a basic respect for the marketplace itself. But our ideologically driven, authoritarian leftist media seek to destroy that marketplace in favor of a monopoly.
Every day, they come closer to achieving that goal.
Chapter 8
Unfriending Americans
One month before the 2020 election, the New York Post released a bombshell report—a report that could have upended the nature of the election. That report centered on Hunter Biden, son of Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee. According to the Post’s report, “Hunter Biden introduced his father, then–Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company, according to emails obtained by the Post.” A board member of Burisma, the company on whose board Biden sat, sent Hunter Biden a note of appreciation to thank him for the introduction.
The bombshell rebutted Joe Biden’s consistent statements that he knew nothing about his son’s business activities abroad, and that Hunter’s activities had all been aboveboard. The Post even reported the provenance of the emails: Hunter Biden’s laptop had been dropped off at a computer repair shop in Delaware in 2019, and Hunter had never returned to pick up that computer. The Post further reported that “both the computer and hard drive were seized by the FBI in December, after the shop’s owner says he alerted the feds to their existence.”1
It was no surprise to find that Hunter had been trafficking in his father’s name—members of Biden’s family have been doing that for years. In 2019, Politico reported, “Biden’s image as a straight-shooting man of the people . . . is clouded by the careers of his son and brother, who have lengthy track records of making, or seeking, deals that cash in on his name.”2 Hunter admitted publicly in October 2019 that he certainly wouldn’t have been selected to sit on the board of Burisma were his last name different—he has a long history of self-destructive behavior, zero experience in Ukraine, and zero experience with natural gas and oil. ABC News’ Amy Robach asked Hunter, “If your last name wasn’t Biden, do you think you would’ve been asked to be on the board of Burisma?” Hunter responded, “I don’t know. I don’t know. Probably not, in retrospect. But that’s—you know—I don’t think that there’s a lot of things that would have happened in my life if my last name wasn’t Biden. Because my dad was Vice President of the United States. There’s literally nothing, as a young man or as a full grown adult that—my father in some way hasn’t had influence over.”3 For his part, Joe Biden suggested that it was unthinkable that Hunter shouldn’t have taken the position, and absurd to believe that Hunter had been given the position because the company wanted access to Joe.4
Hunter’s willingness to use his father’s name became a front-page issue that same year when Donald Trump, suspicious of corruption in Ukraine, held a controversial phone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in which he stated, “There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. . . . It sounds horrible to me.” Trump’s political opponents accused him of blackmailing a foreign power into digging up dirt on Biden by threatening to withhold aid; the phone call resulted in Trump’s impeachment in the House of Representatives for the first time.5
Now, a year later, the Post was reporting that Biden’s Ukrainian associates had been promised a meeting with Biden himself. Follow-on stories in the Post quoted Hunter Biden’s ex–business associate Tony Bobulinski accusing Joe Biden himself of lying about his knowledge of Hunter’s activities: “I have heard Joe Biden say he has never discussed his dealings with Hunter. That is false. I have firsthand knowledge about this because I directly dealt with the Biden family, including Joe Biden,” Bobulinski alleged.6
The Biden campaign and its media allies responded by calling the Hunter Biden story “Russian disinformation.”7
The story, needless to say, was not Russian disinformation; there was no evidence that it was in the first place. In fact, about a month after the election, media reported that Hunter Biden had been under federal investigation for years—CNN reported that the investigation began as early as 2018, and that it had gone covert for fear of affecting the presidential election.8
The Hunter Biden story never fully broke through into the mainstream consciousness. According to a poll from McLaughlin & Associates, 38 percent of Democratic supporters weren’t aware of the story before the election; by contrast, 83 percent of Republicans were aware of the story.9
There was a reason for that: social media companies such as Twitter and Facebook simply shut down the story cold.
When the Post tweeted out the story, Twitter itself suspended the Post’s account. The company went so far as to prohibit users from posting a link to the story itself. Twitter tr
ied to explain that it would not disseminate stories based on hacked materials—even though the Post’s story was not based on hacked materials. If Twitter had followed the same policies consistently, virtually every major story of the past several decades would have been banned on the platform.
Then, a few days later, Twitter did the same thing with the Post’s follow-up story. Those who attempted to post the links were met with the message, “We can’t complete this request because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful.”
Later, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey would admit that the “communication around our actions . . . was not great.” Spin regarding censorship rarely is.10
Meanwhile, Andy Stone, the policy communications director at Facebook—and an alumnus of the Democratic House Majority PAC, former press secretary for Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA), and former press secretary of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee11—tweeted, “While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want to be clear that this story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform.”12 He added, “This is part of our standard process to reduce the spread of misinformation. We temporarily reduce distribution pending fact-checker review.”13 In other words, Facebook admitted to curbing the reach of the Post story before it had been fact-checked at all. It had no evidence the story was false—as it turns out, the Post story was true. But Facebook restricted the reach of the Post piece anyway.
Facebook actually had moderators manually intervene in order to shut down the Post story, as the company admitted: “[W]e have been on heightened alert because of FBI intelligence about the potential for hack and leak operations meant to spread misinformation. Based on that risk, and in line with our existing policies and procedures, we made the decision to temporarily limit the content’s distribution while our factcheckers had a chance to review it. When that didn’t happen, we lifted the demotion.”14
Just in time for Joe Biden to cruise to the presidency.
FROM OPEN AND FREE TO THE NEW GATEKEEPERS
The real story of the Hunter Biden saga, as it turned out, was not about Hunter Biden per se: it was about the power and willingness of an oligopoly to restrict access to information in unprecedented ways. Social media companies were founded on the promise of broader access to speech and information; they were meant to be a marketplace of ideas, a place for coordination and exchange. They were, in other words, the new town square.
Now social media are quickly becoming less like open meeting places and more like the town squares in Puritan New England circa 1720: less free exchange of ideas, more mobs and stocks.
The saga of the social media platforms begins with the implementation of the much-maligned and misunderstood Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in 1996. The section was designed to distinguish between material for which online platforms could be held responsible and material for which they could not. The most essential part of the law reads, “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” The New York Times, for example, can be held liable as a publisher for information appearing in its pages. The New York Times’ comments section, however, does not create liability—if a user posts defamatory material in the comments, the Times does not suddenly become responsible.
The purpose of Section 230, then, was to open up conversation by shielding online platforms from legal liability for third parties posting content. Section 230 itself states as much: the goal of the section is to strengthen the internet as “a forum for a true diversity of political discourse, unique opportunities for cultural development, and myriad avenues for intellectual activity.”15 As the Electronic Freedom Foundation describes, “This legal and policy framework has allowed for YouTube and Vimeo users to upload their own videos, Amazon and Yelp to offer countless user reviews, craigslist to host classified ads, and Facebook and Twitter to offer social networking to hundreds of millions of Internet users.”16
There is one problem, however: the stark divide between platforms for third-party content and publishers who select their content begins to erode when platforms restrict the content third parties can post. Thus, for example, a New York court found in 1995 that Prodigy, a web services company with a public bulletin board, became a publisher when it moderated that board for “offensiveness and ‘bad taste.’”17 In reaction, Section 230 created an extremely broad carve-out for platforms to remove offending content; bipartisan legislators wanted to protect platforms from liability just for curating content in order to avoid seamy or ugly content. Thus Section 230 provides that no platform shall incur liability based on “any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.”18
At the beginning, our major social media companies understood full well the intent behind Section 230. In fact, they celebrated it. Facebook’s mission statement for its first decade was “to make the world more open and connected.”19 Twitter said that its goal was “to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.”20 Google’s working motto was simple: “Don’t be evil.”
For a while, it worked.
The social media giants were essentially open platforms, with a light hand in terms of censorship. Then the 2016 election happened.
The shock that greeted Trump’s victory in 2016 fundamentally altered the orientation of the social media platforms. That’s because, up until that moment, the personal political preferences of executives and staffers—overwhelmingly liberal—had meshed with their preferred political outcomes. But with Trump’s win, that math changed dramatically. Members of the media and the Democratic Party began looking for a scapegoat. They found one in social media. If, the logic went, Americans had been restricted to viewing news the New Ruling Class wanted them to view, Hillary Clinton would have been installed as president rather than Trump. The dissemination of information was the problem.
Media elites and Democratic Party members couldn’t make that argument explicitly—it was simply too authoritarian. So instead, they designed the concept of “fake news”—false news that Americans had apparently been bamboozled by. Post-election, the term gained ground in rapid fashion, with left-wing sites like PolitiFact explaining, “In 2016, the prevalence of political fact abuse—promulgated by the words of two polarizing presidential candidates and their passionate supporters—gave rise to a spreading of fake news with unprecedented impunity.” Predictably, PolitiFact blamed Facebook and Google.21 After the election, President Barack Obama—a man who certainly was no stranger to dissemination of false information, often with the compliance of a sycophantic press—complained about the “capacity to disseminate misinformation, wild conspiracy theories, to paint the opposition in wildly negative light without any rebuttal—that has accelerated in ways that much more sharply polarize the electorate and make it very difficult to have a common conversation.”22 In November 2017, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) openly threatened the social media companies, growling, “You created these platforms . . . and now they’re being misused. And you have to be the ones who do something about it—or we will. . . . We are not going to go away, gentlemen. . . . Because you bear this responsibility.”23
Initially, Facebook rejected the idea that as a platform it had somehow shifted the election to Trump—or that it bore responsibility for the material on its platform. That, of course, was the basic supposition of Section 230: that platforms do not bear responsibility for material placed there by third parties. Zuckerberg correctly countered the criticisms: “I do think that there is a certain profound lack of empathy in asserting that the only reason why someone could hav
e voted the way that they did was because they saw some fake news. I think if you believe that, then I don’t think you have internalized the message that Trump supporters are trying to send in this election.”24
But the tsunami of rage at social media continued.
And, faced with the combined power of staff unrest, media manipulation, and Democratic Party threats, the social media companies shifted. They began to jettison their roles as the guardians of open and free discourse and began to embrace their new roles as informational gatekeepers.
In February 2017—just weeks after the inauguration of President Trump—Zuckerberg redefined Facebook’s mission. Now, he said, the goal of the company was to “develop the social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that works for all of us.” This was a far more collectivist vision than the original vision. And it called for new content standards to help reach this utopian goal, designed to “mitigat[e] areas where technology and social media can contribute to divisiveness and isolation.”25
Facebook would no longer stay on the sidelines. Facebook would get involved. In a congressional hearing in April 2018, Zuckerberg went so far as to state that “we are responsible for the content” on the platform—a direct contravention of Section 230.
On a personal level, Zuckerberg continued to maintain his allegiance to free speech principles. In that April 2018 hearing, Zuckerberg stated, “I am very committed to making sure that Facebook is a platform for all ideas. . . . We’re proud of the discourse and the different ideas that people can share on the service, and that is something that, as long as I’m running the company, I’m going to be committed to making sure is the case.”26 Speaking at Georgetown University in 2019, Zuckerberg maintained, “People no longer have to rely on traditional gatekeepers in politics or media to make their voices heard, and that has important consequences. I understand the concerns about how tech platforms have centralized power, but I actually believe the much bigger story is how much these platforms have decentralized power by putting it directly into people’s hands.” He then correctly noted, “We can continue to stand for free expression, understanding its messiness, but believing that the long journey toward greater progress requires confronting ideas that challenge us. Or we can decide the cost is simply too great. I’m here today because I believe we must continue to stand for free expression.”27