Is Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg a Well-Intended Liberal with a Massive Blind Spot?

While Mark Zuckerberg’s much-publicized meeting with conservative leaders last week has drawn varied responses, from Glenn Beck’s overly fawning account to others who were positive but circumspect, what seems clear is that Zuckerberg genuinely wants Facebook to be viewed as a neutral and fair platform for the entire world.

But does Zuckerberg have a massive blind spot in his thinking and worldview? And is he totally unaware of the many times conservatives (especially biblically-based conservatives) have been censored on Facebook while their opponents have not?

I have documented this several times in my own experience (see here and here and here), although thankfully, Facebook has ultimately treated me fairly when I reached out to the right contact person there and pursued the matter.

Other colleagues have not fared as well, having had their pages shut down for expressing biblically-based views on subjects like homosexuality.

There was also an Israeli group, Shurat HaDin, that conducted a fascinating experiment on Facebook in Hebrew and Arabic, simultaneously releasing posts on two different pages that could rightly be called anti-Israeli (Stop Israelis, in Arabic) and anti-Palestinian (Stop Palestinians, in Hebrew), with the posts becoming increasingly strident by the minute.

Shurat HaDin was not impressed with Facebook’s subsequent statement that their actions were a “mistake.”

How can Zuckerberg’s Facebook be so one-sided so often while Zuckerberg seemed to be utterly unaware of it?

As he explained on his May 19th show, “The point is, I was watching Chatsworth Osborne Jr. talk about it, and he said that he or somebody else pointed out to Zuckerberg, ‘Do you have anybody that works here who is not born and raised in a left-wing cultural? Because that's why your algorithms are the way they are. If you don't have any conservatives working for you, there's no way you can have a conservative algorithm.’”

He continued, “And Chatsworth pointed out to 'em that you're never gonna get this algorithm stuff fixed until you get some people working here, until you get some diversity, some ideological diversity. And he said that Zuckerberg agreed with that. He said that Zuckerberg is a little bothered that Fakebook [sic] has taken on such a political identity.”

Simply stated, the problem is that in Zuckerberg’s world, liberal causes are the causes – the valid causes; the right causes; the causes for equity and fairness; the causes of the masses – whereas conservative causes (again, especially biblically-based conservative causes) should often be resisted.

As more than one LGBT activist has said to me when I challenged their so-called tolerance, “I don’t tolerate bigots any more than I tolerate the Nazis or the KKK.”

Think for a moment about Facebook’s well-known partnership with gay activist groups like GLAAD, originally the acronym for the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, but now simply GLAAD.

GLAAD helped Facebook introduce the “Custom” feature for gender identification, allowing users to pick from 50 different gender identities, including 10 simultaneously. (When this was not enough, Facebook, again with help from GLAAD, introduced the “fill in the blank” option.)

Several years ago, I renamed them the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Disagreement, since they openly call for national media to censor conservative viewpoints on their shows, claiming that the conservative commentators on their list (which today number more than 100) “represent nothing but extreme animus towards the entire LGBT community.”

Included on this list of people to be blacklisted by the media (as of May 22, 2016) are: Dr. Ben Carson; Rev. Franklin Graham; Dr. Ryan T. Anderson of the Heritage Foundation; Jim Daly of Focus on the Family; Princeton Professor Robert George; Tony Perkins of the FRC; national Hispanic leader Samuel Rodriguez; Southern Baptist leaders like Albert Mohler and Richard Land; journalists like Erick Erickson and Todd Starnes; Catholic leaders like Bill Donahue and Jennifer Roback Morse – just to name a few.

Yes, GLAAD wants ABC and CBS and NBC and CNN and FOX and others to block Dr. Carson and Rev. Graham from sharing their views on marriage and family on their networks because they “represent nothing but extreme animus towards the entire LGBT community.”

This is the world in which Mark Zuckerberg lives, because of which it is totally understandable that he has such a massive blind spot when it comes to Facebook’s political identity. Of course it has an extremely liberal identity. What else could he expect?

All this reminds me of the kidnapping of Adolf Eichmann, the notorious Nazi mass murderer, who was apprehended by two Israeli agents while living quietly with his family in Argentina.

They had to wait for several weeks before smuggling him out of the country, during which time they spent many hours in private conversation with him, somehow managing to restrain themselves from taking the law into their own hands.

During one of the conversations, one of the agents realized that Eichmann had given the order to exterminate the village in which his wife’s family lived, killing every single one of them.

When asked how he could do such a thing, Eichmann seemed perturbed, responding, “But they were Jews.”

To be 1,000 percent clear, I am not equating Zuckerberg with a Nazi. God forbid!

My point is that, sometimes, people are so caught up in a particular worldview that they are entirely oblivious to other perspectives, and that seems to be what has happened to Zuckerberg and his liberal colleagues.

From my perspective, the LGBT activists whom I oppose genuinely believe they are fighting for equality, justice, and freedom, and I believe I can present their own talking points in a fair, persuasive, and even compelling manner. I simply disagree with those talking points for many reasons.

If Mark Zuckerberg and his colleagues could do the same with conservatives, explaining back to us what we value and why we value it, doing so in sympathetic and coherent terms, then he would be able to set Facebook on a path towards neutrality.

Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.

Never go outside the expertise of your people.

Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy.

Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.

Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.

A good tactic is one your people enjoy.

A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.

Keep the pressure on. Never let up.

The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.

The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.

If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.

The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.

Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

O’Sullivan’s First Law

An eternal truth.

By John O’Sullivan

EDITOR’S NOTE: This appeared in the October 27, 1989, issue of National Review.

Robert Michels — as any reader of James Burnham's finest book, The Machiavellians, knows was the author of the Iron Law of Oligarchy. This states that in any organization the permanent officials will gradually obtain such influence that its day-to-day program will increasingly reflect their interests rather than its own stated philosophy. To take a homely example, congressmen from egalitarian parties somehow end up voting for higher pay and generous expenses for congressmen. We can also catch an ironic echo of Michels's law in Stalin's title of General Secretary, as well as in the fact that powerful mandarins in the British government creep about under such deceptive pseudonyms as "Permanent Under-Secretary." All of which is by way of introducing a new law of my own. My copy of the current Mother Jones (well, it's my job to read that sort of thing — I take no pleasure in it) contains an advertisement for Amnesty International. Now, AI used to be a perfectly serviceable single-issue pressure group which drew the world's attention to the plight of political prisoners around the globe. Many people owe their lives and liberty to it. But that good work depended greatly on AI's being a single-issue organization that helped victims of both left- and right-wing regimes and was careful to remain politically neutral in other respects. Its advertisement in Mother Jones, however, abandons this tradition by calling for an end to the death penalty.
The ad itself, needless to say, is the usual liberal rhubarb. "In American courtrooms," it intones, "some have a better chance of being sentenced to death." That is true: the people in question are called murderers. But Al naturally means something different and more sinister — namely that poor, black, and retarded people are more likely to face the electric chair than other murderers.
Let us suppose this to be the case. What follows? A mentally retarded person incapable of understanding the significance of his actions cannot be guilty of murder or of any other crime. A law that punishes him (as opposed to one that confines him for his own and society's safety) is unjust and should be changed — whether or not he faces the death penalty. On the other hand, someone who is guilty of murder may be executed with perfect justice. His race or economic circumstances do not affect the matter at all. The fact that other murderers may obtain lesser sentences does not in any way detract from the justice of his own punishment. After all, some murderers have always escaped scot-free. Would Amnesty have us release the rest on the grounds of equality of treatment? Finally, Amnesty's argument from discrimination could be met just as well by executing more rich, white murderers (which would be fine with me) as by executing no murderers at all. Significantly, Amnesty's list of death-penalty victims" does not include political prisoners. America does not, have political prisoners, let alone execute them. Why, then, Amnesty's campaign on the issue?
That is explained by

O'Sullivan's First Law:
All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.
I cite as supporting evidence the ACLU, the Ford Foundation, and the Episcopal Church. The reason is, of course, that people who staff such bodies tend to be the sort who don't like private profit, business, making money, the current organization of society, and, by extension, the Western world. At which point Michels's Iron Law of Oligarchy takes over — and the rest follows.

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