by Milo 18 May 2016
A delegation of Establishment conservative types descended on Silicon Valley today to make Facebook look good.
I have some thoughts about it. This is going to be a long column, so strap yourselves in.
I’m sure it wasn’t these conservative figures’ intent merely to assist in Facebook’s marketing efforts, but at this point, if maliciousness is ruled out as a motivation, extreme stupidity is the only possible remaining explanation.
That, and perhaps a touch of pathetic egotism. I think many of those invited are a little starstruck by Zuck. After all, he’s the millennial billionaire CEO of the largest social network on the planet, and has spent the last decade making old media irrelevant, a point made plain by the amount of “I’m on my way!!!!!!” Facebook posts posted by attendees today.
It’s hard to imagine Truman posting selfies on the way to Potsdam, or really any serious person about to engage in an endeavour that might affect the course of the national election. But hey, it’s current year, and all bets are off.
Eric Bolling let this attitude slip on Monday’s broadcast of The Five, where he congratulated Fox pundit Dana Perino on the “fantastic honor” of being invited to the meeting.
A meeting where Facebook refuses to admit they did anything wrong, held purely to make the company look good? I’m not sure, but I can’t remember the last time it was an “honor” to be invited as window-dressing by a corporation’s public relations department. Cucked by Zuck. How embarrassing!
It just goes to show how far the media has fallen. I’ve written for years about how craven and credulous the tech press is. But I never imagined that the great and good of conservative media would be just as eager to pay obeisance to private companies. Sad!
The problem for Facebook is: nobody’s buying it. Here’s the thing, Zuck — you’ve spent a year trying to out-do Jack Dorsey with your barking-mad progressive proclamations (
America should “follow Germany’s lead on immigration,” messages in support of All Lives Matter are “deeply hurtful”).
Conservatives — by which I mean the people at home — are not dumb. They know what the political priorities of your company are, and they want to see truth and transparency or they will simply leave the platform.
Zuckerberg’s staff aren’t prone to hiding their biases, which doesn’t help public relations efforts.
In April, we learned that a number of Facebook’s staff voted to ask the CEO what the company was doing to stop Donald Trump becoming President. In other words, there are people at Facebook who
want the social network to influence elections, and aren’t afraid of wearing that opinion on their sleeves. And they’re most likely in the majority.
We don’t know if Zuckerberg ever responded to the call for anti-Trump bias as an official policy. We do, however, know that the Facebook CEO is at least as anti-Trump as his employees,
recently condemning “fearful voices calling for building walls.”
Another Facebook employee who wears their progressivism on their sleeve is COO Sheryl Sandberg. Everyone knows about
Lean In, the career-feminist book subject to relentless adulation in the progressive media, but even that book is moderate compared to
the wacky feminist thesis she wrote during her time at Harvard, which
Breitbart exclusively obtained and published this weekend.
Most damningly, there’s Zuckerberg’s appetite for government diktat, such as the authoritarian stance of the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, towards her own people’s justified concerns about immigration.
At the height of the refugee crisis, Facebook and other social networks openly teamed up with the Germany government to quash critics of the country’s open-door policies.
Well, congratulations on the spread of ravaging rapefugees, Mark. Zuckerberg felt emboldened to do the same with the U.S. election but is quickly learning that Americans are cut from a different cloth. It is very dangerous to drink your own Kool-Aid and think you’re the smartest man in the room. Just ask Glenn Beck!
When Facebook can’t suppress critics of open-door immigration outright, they can still hamper the growth of their communities.
Earlier today, we published an exclusive account of the difficulties critics of immigration have faced on the platform.
In one case, an anti-amnesty filmmaker saw 4,000 “likes” artificially removed from his page, only to have them restored after he made legal threats against Facebook. One sales rep at the social network allegedly told him he had “never seen” a business account treated the same way.
Despite all this, Facebook believes that a feel-good PR-controlled photo op with Beck, a couple of think-tank directors and a few talking heads is going to dispel perceptions that the company is biased against conservatives. Pull the other one.
The meeting took place at Menlo Park — named after Thomas Edison’s experimental laboratory village. Edison, of course, was known for stealing the ideas of others, and using onerous restrictions to try to control parts of the media. So nothing at all in common with Zuckerberg, then.
The meeting has clearly succeeded in making some of the terminally uncool delegation seem important and relevant again — a feeling some of them probably haven’t enjoyed for years. Perhaps that’s why there are so many selfies spilling out.
Continued:
http://www.breitbart.com/milo/2016/0...hoot-facebook/