Facebook and the “Meddling” Russians Deserve Some Credit

President Trump was never more on the mark than when he exposed the one-sidedness of our national media as being “fake news.”  What has become known as the “Trump Derangement Syndrome” is easy to spot.

     This is what we get on television and in the newspaper by default.  It is the norm unless we deliberately go out of our way to find one of the few voices on the right.  News now follows the example of the commercial, with the same liberal message pounded into our heads again and again, hour after hour, months on end.  No wonder that people don’t seem to have minds of their own.

      Every now and then, however, a new target of vituperation shows up.  Frontline’s recent two-film series The Facebook Dilemma reveals a national press attempting to intimidate big social media companies like Facebook.   Mark Zuckerberg apparently went too far when he wanted to “Give people the power to share” in order to make the world “a lot more open and connected.”  Even Tim Sparapani, Facebook’s onetime Director of Public Policy, says that “I think some of us had an early understanding that we were creating, in some ways, a digital nation-state. This was the greatest experiment in free speech in human history.”

      Perhaps driven by this ideal, Facebook inadvertently provided a new mechanism to combat one-sidedness.  Now both sides could have their say, beyond just the official liberal orthodoxy.  The “meddling” Russian Internet Research Agency decided to create some “fake” pro and con discussion groups, according to Facebook’s Alex Stamos:  “What the Internet Research Agency wants to do is they want to create the appearance of legitimate social movements. So they would create, for example, a pro-immigration group and an anti-immigration group, and both of those groups would be almost caricatures of what those two sides think of each other.”

      Of course, caricatures are by definition deliberately fake and distorted, but in a positive way to get people to notice truths below the surface.  How dare Facebook give the political right any platform for letting conservatives have a voice. As Stamos says, “their goal of running ads were to find populations of people who are open to those kinds of messages to get them into those groups and then to deliver content on a regular basis to, to drive them apart.”  In fact, “Really, what the Russians are trying to do is find these fault lines in U.S. society and amplify them.”

     One liberal detractor, Obama’s James Clapper, former director of national intelligence, expressed the fear that two-sidedness was a threat to the country, one that would empower those who weren’t worthy of free speech:  “We’re such a ripe target for that sort of thing and the Russians know that. So the Russians exploited that divisiveness, that polarization because they had, they had messages for everybody. You know, Black Lives Matter, white supremacists, gun control advocates, gun control opponents. It didn’t matter. They had messages for everybody.”

   Clapper was chagrined that some ideals of democracy might actually be taken seriously:  “And I believe the Russians did a lot to get people out to vote that wouldn’t have and helped the appeal for, of, of Don-, of Donald Trump.”   Even worse, all of this was happening just when the left thought that it owned social media companies—and could implicitly count on their unthinking support, just as they do from other almost-100% voting blocks.  The cartoon graphic above might need to be adjusted.