May 23, 2016

Quote of the Day: The Conservative Fight to Become First Gnat

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From conservative Jim Geraghty on the ongoing spat between right-wingers about who’s selling out to whom in the great Facebook War of 2016:

I’m pretty darn sure that throwing around accusations of gutlessness and useful idiocy are far more about deciding who should be deemed First Gnat than they are about actually changing behavior in Silicon Valley.

The ostensible subject of this war is whether Facebook is deliberately suppressing conservative stories in its Trending Topics feed. A bunch of conservatives met with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about this, and when it was all over Glenn Beck praised Zuckerberg for listening while Tucker Carlson insisted that Beck was a Zuckerberg toady. It went downhill from there.

But here’s what gets me. Unless I’ve missed something, this entire squabble is based on the claims of one (1) anonymous former member of the team responsible for Trending Topics. That’s it. Am I wrong about this? Has there been any other serious evidence one way or the other about Facebook’s alleged bias? Are conservatives really rending their garments over something so thin?

Of course, we liberals are going through the same thing on a larger scale in the current war between Hillarybots and Berniebros (or whatever we call them these days). But at least that’s tediously normal, since it happens every time Democrats are competing for the White House. I recommend that conservatives go back to fighting over Donald Trump. At least that matters.

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It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

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