Conservative Revolt at – Facebook? – By Matthew Vadum (frontpagemag.com) / Aug 31 2018
Conservative Facebook employees create an internal group to fight back.
Conservative Facebook employees fed up at the social media behemoth’s oppressive, intolerant corporate culture have created an internal group to fight back.
It’s no secret that social media platforms have been suppressing and marginalizing ideas they don’t like — and the ideas they don’t like are overwhelmingly of the conservative and patriotic variety.
But this new revolt is significant because internal dissent is almost unheard of at Facebook. When Google engineer James Damore wrote an internal memo arguing that forced diversity at the company wasn’t a positive thing and that so-called underrepresentation of women in the technology field probably wasn’t related to sexism, Google fired him.
The internal group, called FB’ers for Political Diversity, came into being after senior Facebook engineer Brian Amerige posted an item titled, “We Have a Problem With Political Diversity,” on Facebook’s internal message board last week.
According to a New York Times article, more than 100 of Facebook’s approximately 30,000 employees have joined the new group since it was formed days ago. However, at press time, there were two groups with the same name listed on Facebook. One had a membership of 476; the other, 1,228.
“We are a political monoculture that’s intolerant of different views,” Amerige wrote in the internal message board post, the New York Times reported. “We claim to welcome all perspectives, but are quick to attack — often in mobs — anyone who presents a view that appears to be in opposition to left-leaning ideology.”
The newspaper report continued:
The aim of the initiative, according to Mr. Amerige’s memo, is to create a space for ideological diversity within the company.
The new group has upset other Facebook employees, who said its online posts were offensive to minorities. One engineer, who declined to be identified for fear of retaliation, said several people had lodged complaints with their managers about FB’ers for Political Diversity and were told that it had not broken any company rules.
President Trump recently threw his support behind a crackdown on social media corporations that discriminate against conservatives.
Earlier this week Trump spoke to reporters:
Yeah, I think Google has really taken advantage of a lot of people. And I think that’s a very serious thing, and it’s a very serious charge. I think what Google and what others are doing — if you look at what’s going on at Twitter, if you look at what’s going on in Facebook, they better be careful, because you can’t do that to people. You can’t do it.
We have tremendous — we have literally thousands and thousands of complaints coming in. And you just can’t do that. And so I think that Google and Twitter and Facebook, they’re really treading on very, very troubled territory. And they have to be careful. It’s not fair to large portions of the population.
The politically-driven censorship of conservatives by the gigantic, unregulated social media corporations controlled by the Left is moving into high gear as the crucial midterm congressional elections of Nov. 6 approach.
Facebook is one of the worst offenders.
Facebook disabled videos produced by PragerU, a nonprofit group founded by conservative radio talk show host Dennis Prager that has 3 million Facebook followers. Two videos were suppressed as alleged examples of “hate speech.” When PragerU’s Will Witt complained on Facebook, his post was marked as spam.
The videos were titled “Make Men Masculine Again” with Allie Beth Stuckey of the CRTV show “Allie,” and “Where Are the Moderate Muslims?” with researcher Hussein Aboubakr.
Facebook blocked a campaign ad by Elizabeth Heng, a Republican congressional candidate in California, that featured graphic footage of the Communist genocide in Cambodia. Heng argued the images were an important part of her personal story because her parents just barely avoided death in Cambodia before they fled to the U.S.
“My parents did not have the luxury of blocking the horrific content from the reality of their lives during the rise of communism in Cambodia[,]” Heng tweeted. “Why does @facebook feel they have the right to censor that content in the land of #freespeech?”
In the springtime, Facebook’s crackdown on Trump supporters Diamond and Silk’s page with 1.2 million Facebook followers was exposed at a congressional hearing at which Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was the star witness. Facebook arbitrarily determined the content generated by the two sisters, Lynnette Hardaway and Rochelle Richardson, who merely appear on camera and talk without advocating violence or law-breaking, was “unsafe to the community.”
Diamond and Silk protested that Facebook allows “appalling” things – “videos of people getting shot, killed, and beat up… they even show pictures of our President decapitated.” Muslim terrorist-sympathizing groups and violent Antifa and related anarchist and communist groups have long operated with impunity on Facebook.
Will this new rebellion led by Facebook engineer Brian Amerige bring true political diversity to the social media corporation?
Time will tell.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271200/conservative-revolt-–-facebook-matthew-vadum
