Ben Shapiro on Joe Rogan

[Dan Druff]

Ugh. Mumbles, every time you post a Young Turks video, I think, "I know this is going to be really awful, but I'll give it a chance, maybe they're making a reasonable point this time."

Then I spend time watching the clip, and.... nope! Once again it's terrible.

And by terrible I don't mean, "I disagree with it." I mean that the segment sucks, their points suck, the premise sucks, and it's not at all entertaining. Plus Anna Kasparian is very off-putting.

In this case, they ramble on and on about Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire "violating Facebook terms of serivce". What?! That's now newsworthy on The Young Turks? Are they getting that desperate for content, where they're doing 8-minute segments about small ToS violations on other companies' websites?

Laughably, when TYT thought they were really onto something and were going to bust Shapiro, they whined to Facebook, who then told them to GTFO and mind their own business. Basically it went like this:

TYT: OMG OMG OMG!! We caught Ben Shapiro's people making 14 Facebook groups on your service which only exist to promote him! You should totally ban him because that's totally a ToS violation of your service! It's okay, you can thank us later for finding this.

Facebook: Uhh... not really? Tons of companies do this and we haven't even decided yet if this actually violates our policies. We're going to revisit it next month and think about it again, but for right now, everything's fine.

TYT: OMG OMG OMG scandal!!! Now we are going to expose how Facebook is actually conservative-friendly, not liberal-friendly! Huge story!


So lame.

News flash: Facebook is a shitty, exploitative, selfish company which cares about money over everything else. So yes, they are letting ANY company get away with making phony groups to promote themselves, so long as these companies are also spending advertising dollars on the platform. As long as Facebook stuffs dollars into their grimy pockets, they don't really care which political party they're helping. (They are left-biased when it comes to matters which don't affect them financially, however.)

Anyway, this detail about Facebook worshiping the altar of the almighty dollar has been known for years. TYT is turning this into an "OMG Facebook is actually conservative-biased so the right claiming they're victimized by Big Tech is total BS" moment, and once again they are totally misunderstanding what's going on and how Facebook operates.

I love how you defend Ben Shapiro’s website doing shady self-promotion because “[t]ons of companies do this”. Yet, you are super quick to criticize any shady shit a politician or “lefty” you don’t like engages in. Way to ethically “fair and balanced”.

As much as I hate defending Facebook, I will say that they are the ones who determine what constitutes spam on their own platform, and what is the proper use for Facebook Groups.

If they're okay with paid advertisers also making some Facebook Groups backdoor promoting themselves, then that should be the end of it.

When it all comes down to it, all Shapiro's people are accused of doing is sneaking some extra marketing of themselves into Facebook Groups. If Facebook is okay with that (probably because Shapiro advertises there in a traditional fashion as well), then that's that. Even TYT admits that Facebook told them that this isn't currently against their rules.

It's a non-story. Even if this were against Facebook rules and Facebook clamped down upon it, this would still be a non-story.

OMG, Ben Shapiro's people made 14 conservative Facebook groups and promoted him! Stop the presses! Big scandal!

Do you really think this was worth an 8-minute segment on TYT? They're really grasping at straws.