We know that Facebook censored people throughout the pandemic. We know that if the Biden administration asked them to censor people, the social media giant did it.
This isn't groundbreaking news.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said he regrets that the company did it, which is fine except that it could be argued that it constituted election interference. After all, a lot of the people who reported being censored were shut down because of their pro-Donald Trump rhetoric.
The same is true for those who report being throttled on the platform.
But Zuckerberg said that's over. He said he regrets it and it won't happen again, blah, blah, blah.
Now, let's go back four years earlier. Remember when it was a massive scandal because some pages on Facebook were reportedly set up by Russia to try and get Donald Trump elected? Granted, they were really just about creating discord, but they basically pushed memes, and that was election interference, at least as Democrats saw it.
Which brings me to today.
Now, what I'm about to get into is just one man's experiences, namely my own, but I can't help but notice something funny happening at Facebook.
I follow right-leaning pages and non-political pages related to my various interests. Some of those are meme pages, but they're apolitical unless the politics involve the area of interest specifically.
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Yet, in the last few weeks, I've been getting more and more left-leaning content in my feed, and always from pages and groups that I don't follow, have no real overlap with any areas of interest, or anything of the sort.
Normally, I just hide everything from that group, but when I realized how bad it was, I started to figure I needed to get a screenshot of at least one example.
Yeah, it's hardly the most egregious thing I've ever seen and it's not even the first time I've seen it. Some of my left-leaning friends think this is terribly clever for some reason.
Note the word "Follow" in the image next to the page's name. That's a clear indicator that this isn't something I've sought out. This showed up in my feed as something I should like, yet it has almost nothing to do with anything I've shared, commented on, posted, or anything of the sort.
There hasn't been a single one of these from the right. No libertarianism or conservative rhetoric in meme form from pages I'd never heard of and don't actively follow. Only from the left.
Based on how people reacted to things back in 2016, this should be defined as attempted election interference.
It won't work on me or millions of others, but the thing about this is that it doesn't have to work in a vacuum. Consumers get this in their feeds, leftist content on television, leftist rhetoric in their music, and pretty much everywhere else they look. It starts to infest their brains and slowly shifts their thinking and they don't even realize it. They simply don't know there are alternative points of view.
Zuckerberg may feel awful about caving to censorship demands, but I'm not seeing a lot of evidence he won't try to influence things in a completely different way.
It's possible I'm reading too much into this, but I doubt it.
Zuckerberg's operation is still playing games with our political process. It’s just doing it differently this time around.
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