Miranda Devine: Insider blows the whistle on Facebook’s shady behaviour

Facebook is facing the biggest scandal in its history as an insider details how it actively works to supress conservative news, among other problems, writes Miranda Devine.

If anyone knows about Facebook’s bias against conservative publications, it’s the New York Post. After all, it was Facebook which first censored our Hunter Biden scoop last October.

Even so, the Wall Street Journal’s “Facebook Files” exposé about the tech giant’s malfeasance is ­illuminating.

It has uncovered all sorts of dirty laundry at Facebook, from blatant efforts to suppress conservative news to the impact of Instagram on teenage girls.

Now a consortium of 17 American news organisations has begun publishing another set of stories from ­internal company documents released by Frances Haugen, the same whistleblower who ­informed the Journal.

Whatever opaque motives Haugen has, Facebook is getting hit from all sides in what CNN describes as “the most intense and wide-ranging crisis” in the company’s 17-year history.

Mark Zuckerberg has presided over a company now in crisis.

It’s a salutary lesson for founder Mark Zuckerberg, who donated $419 million to help “get out the vote” ­during the presidential election last year, as Mollie Hemingway recounts in her new book Rigged.

The money was used by Democratic activists at nominally non-partisan non-profit organisations effectively to privatise local government election operations in crucial battleground states.

These Zuckerberg-funded non-profits spent three or four times more per voter in areas won by Biden than they spent in Trump areas, Texas election researcher Dr William Doyle found, and likely swung the result.

Zuck’s bucks financed the “infiltration of election offices at the city and county level by left-wing activists”, Doyle wrote in the New York Post this month, “using those offices as a platform to implement preferred administrative practices, voting methods and data-sharing agreements, as well as to launch intensive outreach campaigns in areas heavy with Democratic voters”.

Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen. Picture: AFP

The Zuck non-profits pushed for election-tilting measures such as universal mail-in voting, which is notoriously vulnerable to fraud, and unlocked drop boxes for ballots.

This concierge-style attention lavished on every last Democrat vote may partly explain how Biden scored a record turnout with little visible ­enthusiasm from voters.

“The 2020 election wasn’t stolen,” Doyle wrote. “It was likely bought by one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful men pouring his money through legal loopholes.”

Zuckerberg may have thought his generosity would buy protection from left-wing activists clamouring for Facebook to suppress right-of-centre voices to avoid a repeat of 2016, since they blamed the election of Donald Trump on insufficient censorship.

But appeasement never works and now his company is under siege from left and right.

Facebook’s dilemma is that conservatives traditionally have formed a crucial part of its user base, yet Facebook employees appear to detest them, according to documents on the company’s internal communication system reviewed this week by the Journal for its “Facebook Files” series.

US TV host Tucker Carlson has been called a white nationalist by Facebook employees. Picture: Getty Images

The files show a company beset by woke employees consistently agitating to censor and de-platform conservative media publishers, while management expresses wariness of appearing biased.

For instance, in June 2020, at the height of nationwide riots over the death of a black man at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer, a Facebook employee posted a message on the company’s racial-justice chat board: “Get Breitbart out of News Tab.”

The employee objected to accurate Breitbart headlines such as “Massive Looting, Buildings in Flames, Bonfires!”, saying they were “emblematic of a concerted effort … to paint Black Americans and Black-led movements in a very negative way”.

Other employees agreed but the Trump-friendly news site remained in Facebook’s aggregation feature.

Another employee involved in ad sales argued that “allowing Breitbart to monetise through us is … an ­acceptance of extreme, hateful and often false news used to propagate fear, racism and bigotry”.

Antipathy towards Fox News also runs deep, with various employees calling top-rating host Tucker Carlson a “white nationalist” and “partisan hack” who “looks as though he’s a Golden Retriever who has been consistently cheated out of a cache of treats”.

The Journal found Fox News was one of the conservative sites throttled after Facebook implemented features designed to reduce the spread of what it deemed “misinformation” in the frenzy over the 2016 election result.

Facebook reduced the reach of posts from prolific accounts or those most likely to be shared without being read. The end result was that traffic to Fox News was cut by 7 per cent.

But that was nothing compared to the effect on more right-wing sites such as rushlimbaugh.com, down 31 per cent, Townhall.com, down 22 per cent and Breitbart.com, down 20 per cent.

MSNBC.com was the only left-wing outlet to be deprived of more than 20 per cent of its potential audience due to the algorithms.

​The Journal report is the latest in a series of damaging revelations about the social media giant.

Nick Clegg, Facebook vice- president of global affairs and former leader of Britain’s Liberal Democrats party, issued a memo on the weekend telling staff “we need to steel ourselves for more bad headlines in the coming days, I’m afraid,” Axios reported.

Clegg went on to boast about the company’s great civic altruism in spending up big on rigging the 2020 election. It didn’t cost Facebook a penny to censor the New York Post in the weeks before the election.

Facebook has been exposed for rigging the 2020 US Election.

But it did cost it any veneer of ­bipartisan respectability.

It was a chilling exercise of raw political power by an unaccountable global corporation joined by Twitter, which locked the New York Post’s ­account for two weeks.

Facebook claimed it was blocking our Hunter Biden stories, pending a “fact-check”, but more than a year later it has not released the results of its alleged sleuthing.

I know Facebook didn’t contact people, such as Hunter’s business partner Tony Bobulinski, who were recipients of emails we published.

But the social media suppression did its job. It had a chilling effect on other media outlets which dismissed the evidence from the laptop as ­“debunked” or just ignored it.

Polls suggest if the full story of the Bidens’ international influence-peddling scheme had been told before the election it could have changed votes in crucial marginal seats, and possibly flipped the result.

The co-ordinated censorship of America’s fourth largest newspaper amounted to election interference.

It was a historic moment which rang alarm bells around the world and would harden resolve on Capitol Hill to rein in the power of the social media giants.

Miranda Devine is in New York to cover current affairs for The Daily Telegraph