Corporate elites, spurred on by far-left activists, are punishing Facebook for not doing enough to censor its platform, and have deployed a massive advertising boycott against the platform to force its cooperation.
For those who are familiar with Facebook’s track record, which includes banning prominent conservatives and adding others to Orwellian lists of potential “hate agents,” as well as the reported use of “deboosting” algorithms to reduce the visibility of conservative content, the idea that Facebook isn’t censoring is an extraordinary suggestion.
But in the eyes of the far-left, the media, and their allies in corporate boardrooms, the platform has not yet fully committed to their counter-revolution against the Trump movement. They are upset that Mark Zuckerberg has met privately with the president, that Facebook allows a sprinkling of conservative media in its list of trusted news sources, and that it won’t remove President Trump’s ads whenever the Biden campaign complains.
Because of this, the left now sees Facebook as a betrayer of the counter-revolution against Trump.
Since 2016, the left and its allies across the political, media, and corporate establishment deployed a mass media hoax, Russiagate, to try and undo the 2016 election. After that failed, they turned to fomenting social disorder, with major corporations pouring millions of dollars into the radical organizations that encourage unrest on America’s streets.
Throughout all of it, they had the support of the professional misinformers at CNN, NBC, MSNBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post; the sort of people who’ll try to persuade you Antifa isn’t real, and riots are just “peaceful protests,” even as your city burns down in front of your eyes.
In the U.K., elites worked furiously to overturn the Brexit referendum, deploying every bureaucratic and legal trick in their arsenal, even politicizing the historically neutral office of the Speaker of the House of Commons. The European Union from which Britain narrowly escaped, meanwhile, is trying to force its populist eastern member states to surrender their immigration policies. In Brazil, unelected judges are eyeing President Bolsonaro, sharpening their knives. In every country where populists have been successful, we see the same theme of elite counter-rebellion.
All of these represent extraordinary attacks on democracy. But their most powerful tool is also their newest — Big Tech censorship.
Silicon Valley is filled with leftists, a fact their leaders openly admit. Big Tech companies like Twitter, Google, Facebook, and YouTube have spent the last four years systematically purging prominent Trump supporters from their platforms, and burying conservative media in search results.
But that’s not enough for the corporate elites.
Because Facebook has thus far resisted pressure from the Democrats to censor President Donald Trump’s ads, it has become a target for the corporate-owned left-wing media and its elite allies in the business world. A recent New York Times article went so far as to claim that the platform has a secret deal to favor Trump ahead of the next election, completely ignoring the fact that the platform has purged some of the president’s most influential supporters. Depending on whether the writer actually believed what they were writing, the piece was either the pinnacle of delusion or the pinnacle of Machiavellian propaganda.
Either way, leftists and anti-Trump elites have decided that Facebook isn’t doing enough to stop the president’s re-election. So they’ve gone to war. Massive brands, including Verizon and Unilever, have declared they will pull their ads from the platform, while other brands like Coca-cola going even further, declaring they will cease advertising on all social media platforms for the remainder of the year.
The brands are being mobilized by “Stop Hate for Profit,” an umbrella campaign managed by far-left organizations including Sleeping Giants, Color of Change, the Anti-Defamation League, and the NAACP.
The campaign is targeted squarely at Facebook, calling out the platform for working with conservative media. It complains that Breitbart News is a trusted source on Facebook and that the Daily Caller is one of Facebook’s third-party fact-checkers. It falsely claims that both publications have “track records of working with white nationalists.”
This is typical behavior of the far-left. Organizations like Sleeping Giants exist to harass corporations with mass-emails and social media messages containing smears about conservative media. Sleeping Giants has targeted almost all popular conservative and populist media sources with its smears, including Fox News shows like Tucker Carlson Tonight, Dennis Prager, and the Daily Wire.
Facebook deserves credit for resisting Democrat pressure to censor President Trump’s ads. But Facebook, like other Big Tech platforms, is highly dependent on ad revenue. Mark Zuckerberg has already lost $7 billion as a result of the boycott. Much as you might expect, the company has already begun to cave in to the pressure, announcing a raft of new measures to censor content, including vaguely-defined “hateful” political ads.
The left wins because it’s a seemingly reasonable concept: advertisers shouldn’t have to have ads on hate speech. The problem is that Silicon Valley and corporate leftists, advised by radical, hate-filled organizations like Sleeping Giants, get to define what “hate speech” is, taking leaps and bounds of logic to bring the most popular conservative news sources under the label. Breitbart, a frequent target of these far-left groups, regularly tops Alexa web rankings for conservative media. Tucker Carlson Tonight, another frequent target regularly tops the Nielsen rankings.
If President Trump, his campaign, and his supporters across America think he has an easy ride to victory in 2020, they should think again. We have witnessed five years of inexorable elite counter-revolution against the movement he represents, and it is intensifying. It is difficult to remember any president in history who has been the target of this level of pushback. And no other president has had to contend with the sheer level of unaccountable power over the flow of information wielded by the Big Tech giants.
The left doesn’t care how much you hate them — they will do everything they can to silence your voices, overturn your democratic decisions, and reclaim their lost positions of power.
Are you an insider at Google, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, or any other tech company who wants to confidentially reveal wrongdoing or political bias at your company? Reach out to Allum Bokhari at his secure email address allumbokhari@protonmail.com.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News.
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