It’s no secret that social-media companies lean left.
In the beginning, many conservatives believe, there was a free Internet. A paradise of forums unfettered by content guidelines or curators was available to anyone, of any opinion, and all day and all night robust dialogue flourished. But then came Mark Zuckerberg.
Something like this myth is the only way to account for the spasms of outrage that overtake conservatives when it comes to social-media censorship, and the aftermath of the Orlando terrorist attack has provided spasms aplenty. Earlier this week, Facebook removed Pamela Geller’s 50,000-member “Stop Islamization of America” group, saying that it violated the company’s policy against “hateful, threatening, or obscene” forums. Breitbart provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos was briefly suspended from Twitter, as was videogame developer Mark Kern, who tweeted: “I don’t see why mosques with radical leanings should be excluded from surveillance when the rest of us get our emails collected by the NSA.” And Reddit users reported that threads addressing the ideological inclinations of Omar Mateen were locked, posts deleted, and some users banned. The crackdown comes just two weeks after Facebook, Twitter, Google, YouTube, and Microsoft pledged to the European Commission that they would ban “hate speech” on their platforms.
There’s all sorts of right-wing seething, and why not? There’s an unseemly impulse among liberals to reflexively silence people who express opinions with which they disagree. But the myth of a prelapsarian Internet is steering the Right wrong, and it’s time to think differently.
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That’s the solution to the hegemony of the current social-media powers. Facebook is not going to change. Someone who is tired of Facebook imposing its opinions on its users will have to create a better social-media site that is based on conservative principles, and uphold those principles in a way that gives users more freedom.
Conservatives will never make the existing social-media open up to their satisfaction. But they can create their own space in the social-media world and provide a counterweight to the existing ideological monopoly. It won’t be easy. But other conservative media show that it’s possible.
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That’s why we have the Conservative Circle.
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