EVERY U.S. PRESIDENT since Richard Nixon has complained about his news coverage. But the man who lives in the White House now is doing something about it.
In August, Politico reported that the Trump administration is drafting an executive order to counter “liberal” bias in story selection and search results on the platforms Facebook, Twitter, and Google (owner of YouTube). According to this report, both the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission may be tasked with enforcing the neutrality of the digital platforms and the algorithms that prioritize stories and topics.
“Social media bias” must work well as a Republican fundraising pitch, because the administration and its allies in Congress have been harping on it for the past year. In September 2018, Twitter chief Jack Dorsey was hauled before the (then-Republican-controlled) House Energy and Commerce Committee and roasted over arcane and unproven claims of his company’s anti-conservative bias. The next day, Jeff Sessions (then still U.S. attorney general) called a meeting of his state-level counterparts to discuss possible actions against the alleged bias.
In May 2019, after Facebook banned the right-wing conspiracy monger Alex Jones, the White House launched a website for Americans to lodge their complaints about social media bias. Then, in July, it hosted a White House social media summit attended by such luminaries as James O’Keefe, the purveyor of fraudulently edited undercover videos, Bill Mitchell, a promoter of the deeply twisted Q-Anon conspiracy theory, and some far-right meme-meister who calls himself Carpe Donktum. No one representing Facebook, Google, or Twitter was invited.
The right-wing campaign to intimidate social media companies goes back at least to summer 2016. Back then, a news report appeared in which former Facebook staffers claimed that right-wing news sources were deliberately excluded from what was then the “Trending Stories” box on Facebook. Statistical studies of Trending Stories showed no evidence of such bias, but, in a moment of profound cowardice, Facebook responded by eliminating human editors from the story selections and relying on an algorithm. As a result, utterly false items were prominently promoted in the “trending” box, such as one claiming that TV news personality Megyn Kelly, then still at Fox News, was about to be fired (which she wasn’t) for supporting Hillary Clinton (which she didn’t).
The irony here is that social media, especially Twitter and Facebook, essentially created the Trump administration. No doubt most Silicon Valley executives voted for Hillary Clinton, but they also averted their eyes from those Russian bots spreading false stories and kept staffers on-site at Trump headquarters, to advise the campaign on the most effective use of its social media ad dollars. And, to this day, Fox News is the most shared news source on Facebook.
Social media has a bias all right, but it has nothing to do with political ideology. As you may have heard somewhere, “It’s all about the Benjamins.”
Danny Duncan Collum, author of the novel White Boy, teaches writing at Kentucky State University in Frankfort.
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