ADDICTING INFO
Facebook is in the middle of a charm offensive targeted at conservatives, and is hosting a meeting between company founder/CEO Mark Zuckerberg and conservative media figures like Glenn Beck and Fox News host Dana Perino.
The meeting is happening just six months before a presidential election and in the first election where social media sites like Facebook (and Twitter) have become more influential than ever.
After accusations of anti-conservative bias began to burn Facebook last week, the social media giant quietly reached out to Republican Party leaders to douse the brush fire.
It contacted the Republican National Committee, whose chairman, Reince Priebus, had publicly demanded that Facebook “answer for conservative censorship” — and the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which had blasted out a fundraising email lumping the ostensibly neutral tech company in with the “liberal media,” according to a GOP source. The National Republican Congressional Committee, the GOP’s main House campaign arm, also heard from Facebook, the source added.
The firestorm began after a story on the tech site Gizmodo used an anonymous conservative who claimed to be a former Facebook employee as the source for a story alleging that Facebook was excluding conservative news sources from its trending topics area, a valuable source of traffic for news outlets.
Soon after the piece came out, Facebook denied the allegations and revealed its internal rules for what sites are featured in trending topics, but the damage has been done.
As they have done for years complaining about the “liberal media,” conservatives are now targeting the “liberal bias” at Facebook. Certainly, Zuckerberg appears to personally lean left, and most employees of a modern tech company are not going to be Rush Limbaugh style right-wingers, but the allegation doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on. Conservative sites like Fox News have been shown to trend on Facebook.
What this ends up being is an influential media outlet who now feels they have to curry favor with the right wing, bending over backwards so that very loud conservatives don’t attack them in the same manner they attack the New York Times and MSNBC.
Then, as often happens in conservative media, when false stories and lies about the left surface, Facebook will be obligated to trend them and send traffic and aid in the spread of false information – as long as they aren’t attacked for “liberal bias.”
It’s an excellent strategy for the right to get what it wants in yet another form of media.
Featured image via Flickr
