Recently, many on both the Israeli and American Right have spoken out about rampant political censorship on social media. Facebook and Twitter, they claim, have ceased to be neutral platforms that allow the free circulation of ideas. Instead, these platforms have taken on the role of progressive consciousness engineer in the service of the Left. According to the Pew Research Center, 90% of Republicans believe social media networks are engaged in political censorship.
Twitter and Facebook are far from perfect. They were wrong to block people from sharing opinions that should have been discredited by other users. But we must put this in proportion and warn of the consequences of the claims made by those on the right. A few sources, chief among them the Politico news site, insist there is no evidence of organized, methodical, and consistent censorship of right-wing content on social media. On the contrary, right-wing content has and continues to dominate social media. So, for example, data from social monitoring platform CrowdTangle, as well as other sources, shows that on any given day, a majority of the 10 most organizations, from Trump to Fox News and conservative commentator Dan Bongino. In general, right-wing personalities and pages receive greater exposure and are much more popular than their left-wing counterparts online.
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If Facebook and Twitter are trying to suppress the circulation of right-wing opinions, they're doing an awfully bad job.
The calls on the right for government regulation of social media networks are quite simply a folly. These critics protest the power of the "deep state" at the same time as they seek to empower anonymous regulators with the ability to patrol the internet. Should such a move be implemented, it would birth a series of unplanned results and institutionalize crony capitalism between the social media giants and regulators. This would violate our freedom of expression and further increase the already outsized influence large companies have on politicians.
The social media networks are in fact responsible for the global political awakening on the right that we have witnessed over the past decade. Although unintended, these networks have helped advance significant political change in countless countries, some of them to the benefit of the populist Right. Were it not for Facebook and Twitter, our political pluralism would be much more limited, to say the least. All around the world, people on the right owe a great deal to Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg. Despite having made a few errors in judgment and unnecessary blunders, social media networks were and remain the most liberal forum for freedom of expression humankind has ever known.
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