On Monday night, Breitbart News editor in chief Alex Marlow appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight to bemoan the “woke SJWs” at Facebook who are supposedly suppressing his site’s traffic. To back this accusation, Marlow cited The Wall Street Journal’s recent reporting on the internal dialogue that took place at Facebook after some of its employees took issue with Breitbart’s inclusion in the social media network’s News Tab, a feature where users can read a curation of articles selected by Facebook’s editorial team. One employee argued amid the 2020 racial-justice protests that the site’s incendiary stories were “emblematic of a concerted effort at Breitbart and similarly hyperpartisan sources (none of which belong in News Tab) to paint Black Americans and Black-led movements in a very negative way.”
“These woke SJWs had pressured Facebook senior management into diminishing not just Breitbart’s traffic but traffic across conservative media and deliberately cutting down their most engaged users to favor corporate-billionaire-backed multinational conglomerates––to promote their news over Breitbart’s,” Marlow told Tucker Carlson. Claims similar to Marlow’s were made by Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo and the New York Post, which asserted that the Journal report reveals that Facebook’s anti-conservative “bias is showing—again.”
However, over the past several years, it is Facebook that has allowed sites like Breitbart to flourish, as articles from right-wing media publishers are often the most popular news and opinion items shared on the massive social platform. And while the Journal revealed that a handful of Facebook employees have called on higher-ups to change that, there is no proof that the company actually “cut traffic to Breitbart,” as Carlson claimed in his “Tech Tyranny” segment with Marlow. Instead, the behind-the-scenes discussions at Facebook “show that employees and their bosses have hotly debated whether and how to restrain right-wing publishers, with more-senior employees often providing a check on agitation from the rank and file,” as detailed by Journal reporters Keach Hagey and Jeff Horwitz.
The Journal story, part of the flood of revelations stemming from documents provided by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, also cited quotes from Facebook employees who, in fact, believe that the company offers Breitbart preferential treatment. Namely, they allege Facebook avoids enforcing its own content-moderation policies when Breitbart violates them over fears that doing so would result in another controversy ginned up by conservative media figures. “We’re scared of political backlash if we enforce our policies without exemptions,” wrote one Facebook employee in a communication log obtained by the Journal. In 2020 a Facebook integrity team employee noted that the company offers “special exceptions to our written policies for [Breitbart], and we even explicitly endorse them by including them as trusted partners in our core products.”
As reported by Media Matters, Fox’s Bartiromo misrepresented the Journal’s reporting by arguing that it proves Facebook is particularly censoring the right-wing press. To make her point, Bartiromo mentioned that in the aftermath of the 2016 election, Facebook launched two tools “that disproportionately harmed conservative outlets.” An internal Facebook study did find that the removal of the two tools, “Sparing Sharing” and “Informed Engagement,” would likely increase traffic to Breitbart by 20%, The Washington Times by 18%, the Western Journal by 16%, and The Epoch Times by 11%. However, Media Matters noted that it also “found that cable news channel MSNBC had been impacted even more by the changes than Breitbart, a key fact Bartiromo ignored to make it appear as if the measures had targeted right-wing outlets.”
It’s not only the Journal reporting how Facebook’s management “regularly places political considerations at the center of its decision-making” in hopes of avoiding accusations of bias. The Washington Post reported Monday how CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in the run-up to the 2020 election, objected to a Spanish-language voter information center, “saying it was not ‘politically neutral,’ or could make the company appear partisan.
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