Facebook/Fakebook’s Misleading “Whistleblower” Narrative

By Rob Meyne

Fakebook Wants Regulation

  • Oct. 8, 2021
  • 4-min read

If all you do is read the headlines or watch the tv while napping, you miss the most important elements of many stories. This week saw a well-coordinated effort to present a misleading narrative on Facebook/Fakebook. The long-term strategy is to further justify, or even require, censorship by social media. It featured a Facebook executive in a media campaign planned and directed by Bill Burton, the former Obama message maven, and his agency, as outlined here.

Sunday, Sixty Minutes aired a story about a supposed “whistleblower” who discussed internal research by Facebook that revealed damaging information about its business. It raised issues that have received little or no attention from management. Facebook, unsurprisingly, prioritizes profits and power, and has failed to address a number of problematic effects it has on users, notably young people.
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FB develops their platform to maximize the time people spend on it, make it harder for them to resist checking on updates, and even prioritize negative messages over positive ones. These tactics are proven to lead to low self-esteem, depression, and even suicides.
If this sounds like psychobabble, well, sure it does. But given the research others have conducted, the internal data from Fakebook is unsurprising. What is perhaps noteworthy, if not startling, is their habit of denying the negative effects of their business while failing to launch even modest efforts to deal with them.

The non-whistleblower whistleblower spoke of the need to reform Facebook, not repudiate it, and to fight against “misinformation” by censoring posts. This was widely covered in the legacy media such as here, at CNN.

Let’s get clear on two important points: One, regulation is not a threat to social media. It is a dream come true. Large platforms want more regulation, not less, and have called for it openly. Regulation tends to lock in market share for the leaders and raise the cost of entry for new companies. If you are the dominant player in a category, you would love for government to make it harder for your competitors to take market share.

The government’s embrace also provides a measure of protection. Social media platforms are already granted extremely favorable treatment under federal law and a broader regulatory scheme, aimed at combatting misinformation and censoring dissenting views, would be a win-win for tech gazillionaires and the anti-free speech Democratic Socialists in Washington.

Another essential reality is that social media platforms are not champions of either the Constitution or free speech. We have learned in the past several months how big tech is working with the White House to censor posts by private citizens. FB, Twitter, Youtube, and Google actively manipulated content in 2020 to benefit the Democrats and the Biden campaign.

For example, story on Hunter’s laptop. It broke just before the election. It had compelling evidence that showed Joe Biden was involved in family deals with China and benefits financially from them. Yet social media and most mainstream outlets refused to cover the story and censored posts on it from media outlets or private citizens.

Since the election, outlets like Politico – hardly a right-wing player – have admitted the story is important, the laptop is Hunter’s, and the incriminating emails on them are real.

AAt no time did any of the Bidens deny the information was genuine. Big tech covered up for them anyway. Twitter even banned the New York Post.

Third, most of these companies are no longer “American” companies in any realistic sense. They may have offices here, but their ownership and key markets are largely foreign. Google works with the Chinese Communist Party to censor internet content and enable them to use things like facial recognition to spy on their people, track behavior, restrict movement, and punish citizens who don’t toe the party line. Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is based in CA, but If you think Google is a friend of the U. S. or a defender of freedom, think again.

The supposed whistleblower is doing Facebook’s bidding. It seemed possible, for a moment, that someone at FB had turned on its management – and revealed them to be manipulative, greedy, condescending scum – and that we might be looking at a new era of social platform responsibility and even perhaps, gasp, free speech. If you were taken in by this ruse, go easy on yourself. At one point is looked like the Jets might not suck, too. Hope springs eternal.

The files the “whistleblower” released from FB were featured in a WSJ series she was time on Sixty Minutes, and it was coordinated with Democratic leadership so she could testify Tuesday. The testimony was coordinated with former Obama Administration advisors who worked with Senate Democrats who support censorship and want to silence conservatives.

It is hard to believe they have failed so completely, so quickly, but their zeal to get control of the public debate even if it takes overt censorship proves just how desperate they are. They are even manufacturing supposed “threats” to continue to build the fiction that domestic terrorism is our biggest threat. Attorney General Merrick Garland has even instructed the FBI to investigate parents who protest against issues like Critical Race Theory. And how big is the threat? Well, to date, there have been zero serious attacks on school board members by parents protesting CRT, and zero deaths. But they want us to think it is a huge threat.

The phony whistleblower advocates control of misinformation. “Misinformation” is a newly popular term which can be defined as “Information that does not conform with the preferences or opinions of the current leadership in government, mass media, and big tech.” The term tells you nothing about the truth of the information in question. The term just tells you whether government approves of it.

Our founders, in their brilliance, structured the Constitution so government could not control the flow of information. Their goal was to keep different opinions, and even conflicting information, free and flowing so that all of it would reach the public square and eventually the truth would bear out.

The FB hearing should have sent a shiver of fear through the nation. More governmental control of social and mass media is the biggest threat to our nation that exists today. The Taliban, street gangs, and even pissed off parents at school board meetings can’t collectively approach the threat level we face from the embrace of censorship by our own government.

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