Everyone’s favorite self appointed world speech policeman, Mark Zuckerberg, recently took part in a long form sit down interview with leftist hack “journalist” George Stephanopoulos on ABC, where they talked about user’s privacy on Facebook, putting “strong data controls in place” for policing speech.
Zuckerberg also complained that there’s too much free speech, especially “divisive” political speech, even suggesting that the FCC should regulate speech online.
Facebook has been shutting down traffic to conservative websites since the 2016 election.
Conservatives dominated social media in 2016 where they were able to get the truth uncensored. Facebook ended that in 2017 and 2018.
The Gateway Pundit spoke with two of the top conservative publishers in America.
Floyd Brown is a conservative author, speaker and media commentator. In 2008 Floyd launched Western Journal which quickly became one of the top conservative websites in America. By 2016 Floyd’s organization of Western Journal and other conservative websites under his umbrella had more than a billion page views. Since 2016 Floyd’s organization lost 75% of its Facebook traffic.
Likewise, we spoke with Jared Vallorani from Klicked Media. Jared traveled to Washington DC with The Gateway Pundit and website owners at 100%FedUp in June to discuss Facebook targeting against conservative publishers with Republican lawmakers. Jared told The Gateway Pundit his organization Klicked Media, which hosts over 60 conservative websites, lost 400 million page views from Facebook in the last six months if you compare the traffic to a year ago. Jared said, “We lost 70% to 80% of our traffic if you compare January to May 2017 vs Jan to May 2018.”
If you combine the total number of page-views lost by just these two conservative online publishers you are looking at a loss of over 1.5 billion page-views from Facebook in one year.
These are numbers from just two of the top conservative publishers in America. This does not include the thousands of other conservative publishers across the country who lost all of their traffic coming from Facebook. Here at The Gateway Pundit our Facebook traffic has been effectively eliminated after we were ranked as the 4th most influential conservative publisher in the 2016 election.
The fact that Facebook is targeting conservative publishers should not be a surprise to Gateway Pundit readers.
We have been reporting on this for several months now. In July we released a study where we looked at several top conservative websites and discovered that the publishers had lost an average of 93% of their Facebook traffic.
In February James O”Keefe and Project Veritas published proof from a whistle-blower that Facebook plotted and planned to remove conservative content from their platform.
The information describes how Facebook engineers planned and went about policing political speech.
So when Facebook says they want to crack down on speech, they mean conservative speech.
Stephanopoulos framed the discussion by claiming that Facebook isn’t “doing more to police fake news and hate speech,” before they go on to describe exactly what Zuckerberg doesn’t like and what the answers should be. Somehow it’s all the Russians’ fault.
Portions of the interview read:
STEPHANOPOULOS: Let’s talk about the regulation, your call for regulation. As you know, it’s been met with some skepticism, in some corners. Let’s just tick through some of the questions and have you answer them. One of them is some people see this as a smart tactic to block more-dramatic action. Like, Elizabeth Warren’s called to break up the company. How do you respond to that?
ZUCKERBERG: Well, I’ve spent most of the last few years trying to address these major social issues that we find ourselves at the center of, so everything from policing harmful content, to preventing election interference, to making sure that we have strong data controls in place. And I’m proud of the progress that we’ve made. There’s a lot more to do. But we’ve made a lot of progress over the last couple of years. And one of the things that I now have more of an appreciation about is that, in each of these areas there is a question of, what decisions should be left to a private company to make, especially around things like speech and expression for so many people around the world? And where should we have either industry or more government regulation? And I can give you a few examples of where I think this is really important. You know, after 2016, when we saw what Russia tried to do, in interfering in the election — we’ve implemented a lot of different measures to verify any advertiser who’s running a political ad to create an archive of all the political ads, so anyone can see what advertisers are running, who they’re targeting, how much they’re paying — any other ads that they say. But one of the things that’s unclear is, actually, what is the definition of a political ad, right? And that’s a really fundamental question for this.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Does it have to say, “Vote for,” or, “Vote against,” for example…
ZUCKERBERG: Well, yeah. That’s exactly right. All of the laws around political advertising today primarily focus on a candidate and an election, right, so, “Vote for this candidate in this election.” But that’s not, primarily, what we saw Russia trying to do and other folks who were trying to interfere in elections. And what we saw them doing was talking about divisive political issues. They’d run, simultaneously, different campaigns on social media trying to argue for immigration or against immigration. And the goal wasn’t, actually, to advance the issue forward. It was just to rile people up and be divisive. But the current laws around what is political advertising don’t consider discussion issues to be political. So that’s just one of the examples of where you know, it’s not clear to me, after working on this for a few years now, that we want a private company to be making that kind of a fundamental decision about, you know, what is political speech? And how should that be regulated?
They go on to suggest ways to involve the FCC:
STEPHANOPOULOS: And how do you respond to someone who says, “But wait a second. That’s your responsibility. It’s your platform. It’s your company?”
ZUCKERBERG: Well, I think, broadly, we would say that setting the rules around political advertising is not a company’s job, right? I mean, there’s been plenty of the rules in the past. It’s just that, at this point they’re not updated to the modern threats that we face or the modern kinds of nation state trying to interfere in each other’s elections. We need new rules, right? It’s not, you can’t say that an election is just some period before people go to vote. I mean, the kind of information operations that these folks are trying to do now are ongoing, permanently. So I just think that we need new rules on this. Now, at Facebook, we’re doing the best that we can on each of these issues. But I think, ideally, you would have standards that you would want all of the major companies to be abiding by.
STEPHANOPOULOS: You’re already seeing the FCC push back fairly hard against this, two commissioners, I think, saying, “No, we don’t want to get into the business of policing the First Amendment.”
ZUCKERBERG: Yeah. I don’t think that that’s what this is, though, right? I think it’s you can say that kind of any regulation around what someone says online is protected. But I think that that’s clearly not right today. I mean, we already do have regulations around what you can do, in terms of political advertising. And even without getting into saying, you know, “Okay, here’s the type of content. And here’s what we’re going to define as, you know, hate speech,” for example — I still think it would be a positive step to demand that companies issue transparency reports around, well, here’s the amount of content on your service or that is every kind of harmful category. Here’s the amount of hate speech. Here’s the amount of misinformation. Here’s the amount of bullying of children. Because by making that transparent, that puts more pressure on companies in order to be able to manage that. And people, publicly, can see which companies are actually doing a good job and improving and which ones need to do more. I’m actually — we release our transparency report on how we’re proactively finding all of these harmful kinds of content. Today, it’s every six months. But I’ve committed that we’re going to get to every quarter. Because I actually think that it’s as important — that kind of a transparency report around content, as the quarterly financial statements that we report. I mean, this is, like, really critical stuff for society. So I don’t think that anyone would say that having companies have to be transparent about the amounts of harmful content is any kind of First Amendment issue.
STEPHANOPOULOS: So can you drill down in on it a little more? What do you envision when you see this regulation? Who’s doing it? What exactly are they doing?
ZUCKERBERG: Well, it’s different things in each category. For policing harmful content, I think it should start with transparency of every major internet service about– take any– every single category of harmful content. And I think you should have to, basically, report what the prevalence of that? So what percent of the content on your service is, you know, inciting violence, for example, or hate speech? And then you should have to report how much of that you identified proactively and built systems to go get and be able to manage — versus how much of it did someone in your community have to tell you about, and you had to deal with it reactively? So that’s the first step, is transparency.
Even FCC commissioner Brendan Carr took exception to this:
Facebook issues a new and expanded call for the government to police your online speech, in interview with @GStephanopoulos.
It asks for your speech on “divisive” issues – including posts on immigration – to be regulated by the government as if it were a campaign ad.
No thanks. pic.twitter.com/9a6VhlKjbH
— Brendan Carr (@BrendanCarrFCC) April 4, 2019
Here’s the long form of the interview, which, knowing how the far left media works, may or may not have been edited or had multiple takes done of certain answers to protect Zuckerberg from looking too much like an idiot. A short version of the interview, which aired on Good Morning America, can be found on the ABC YouTube channel.
