big tech

In a letter dated August 26, Meta CEO and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg expressed regret to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) for succumbing to White House pressure to delete posts and comments that displeased the Democratic administration. Zuckerberg admitted he had unwisely yielded to political pressure by removing tweets that criticized Biden’s response to the COVID epidemic. He may have also withheld other statements from public view to avoid offending the government.

But he was wrong, Zuckerberg said, to practice such censorship. Henceforth, he and his team would not interfere with Facebook content because of their ideological preferences or because they were knuckling under to political officials.

Despite Zuckerberg’s reassurances to Jim Jordan, it appears that the old double standard persists among Zuckerberg’s employees.

Zuckerberg seemed to suggest that, in his professional role, he would move away from being a left-wing Democratic Party activist. Instead, his letter implied that he was aligning more with Elon Musk by allowing a wider range of political views on his platform.

This may not reflect Zuckerberg’s true intentions, however. Chronicles, a magazine with which I’m associated, has evidence that Zuckerberg might be reverting to his old ways.

On September 2, our magazine’s executive editor attempted to post on Facebook a commentary titled “A Fighting Chance for Normalcy” by our longtime columnist Tom Piatak. While this is a common practice, something unexpected and troubling occurred: The content was deleted, and we were reprimanded for attempting to post “misleading content.”

Although no one is claiming that Piatak’s exhortation to vote for the Trump-Vance ticket exemplifies objective science, it is by no means more biased than what passes for news interpretation on CNN, MSNBC, and network television. Piatak offers his political opinions and cites reasons for why he thinks those opinions are sound. He contends that as late as the recent past, candidates for national office who held the views of Trump and Vance would not have been seen as “weirdos” or “extremists.” Most Americans probably would have agreed with their views.

Piatak points to the alarm generated by these candidates as evidence of where our power elites have been pushing the United States. At least half the country — including me — would agree with Piatak’s picture of our political radicalization, and there is at least some justification for holding his understanding of the present age.

It’s hard to believe that other political statements approved by Zuckerberg’s censors are more “objective.” Most of the posts I’ve seen on Facebook are partisan opinions or emotional outbursts presented as coherent thoughts. For example, some comments about a recent anti-Israeli, pro-Hamas demonstration on an American campus were deemed acceptable by Facebook.

As the New York Post points out, these posts are often filled with anti-Semitic remarks and innuendos. It seems that because the creators of these posts are politically left-leaning, Facebook’s censors did not remove them. Despite Zuckerberg’s reassurances to Jim Jordan on August 26, it appears that the old double standard persists among Zuckerberg’s employees.

Fortunately, we at Chronicles are not dependent on Zuckerberg’s operation. We rely much more heavily on distributing our writings on X (formerly Twitter), which, unlike Facebook and to the dismay of the corporate media, permits open discussion. We have transferred more and more of our writings to that honest website, especially after Intellectual Takeout, a web publication with which we were long associated, was removed from Facebook for revealing government lies about COVID.

Intellectual Takeout lost lots of its Facebook readers because of Zuckerberg’s servile relationship with the Democratic Party and because of his now-admitted decision to censor those who didn’t follow the White House party line. After our recent experience with Facebook’s censorship, we’re delighted not to have to rely too heavily on this compromised website for publicizing our work.

Chronicles’ situation has not sparked noticeable concern among larger right-leaning enterprises, despite our attempts to inform them. We are a small publication compared to National Review, the Wall Street Journal, or our friends here at Blaze Media. Zuckerberg may have chosen to target smaller publications while leaving the larger ones untouched. However, I suspect a more significant shift may be underway. It seems that Zuckerberg or his employees are moving from censoring small conservative magazines to targeting larger, more widely read publications. If they can arbitrarily remove politically disagreeable content from smaller outlets, they might extend this practice to bigger ones.

To counter this potential strategy, we need to highlight Facebook’s censorship before it spreads further.