Facebook “whistleblower” Frances Haugen made a huge splash as she testified before a Senate subcommittee about the evils of Facebook and its sister platforms. The upshot is that she says that “Congressional action is needed” to regulate not just Facebook, but social media platforms in general. Surprisingly, there were barks of agreement from both sides of the political isle; Democrats and Republicans alike applauded this idea. While it sounds like a straightforward case of regulating a company that has grown very large and very pervasive in our lives, it’s not that simple. In fact, it’s really a very elegantly-laid trap.
There is more going on than meets the eye with the whole Haugen affair; she has a track record of activism with Marxist-sympathizing organizations, and her testimony in the Senate was rife with references to “extremist” behavior, and Facebook’s role in allowing it to spread. She even raised the specter of Myanmar and Ethiopia as examples of what such extremism could lead to. Make no mistake: Frances Haugen is a tool in a bag of tricks, simply a cog in the Marxist machine. She called for regulation and congressional action to rein in Facebook; what was left unsaid is that such action would be applied to all social media platforms. And that’s the point: her calls to regulate social media in order to get the Big, Bad, Scary Facebook under control are being made so that they can cast a wide net that they would not otherwise have been able to justify, regulating speech across all social media platforms.
Facebook does, in fact, have competitors: ConnectZing, Parler, Gab, Getter, and FreeTalk45 are all social media platforms offering varying levels of freedom of speech, and all certainly less restrictive than Facebook. They have naturally attracted more liberty-minded people, and one, Parler, was specifically targeted and taken offline for several weeks after being accused of harboring January 6th “Insurrectionists”. Leftists cheered this development, casting such platforms as cesspools of sedition and treason, even calling them dangerous. Unfortunately for the Marxists, we still live in a Constitutional Republic with speech protections; Parler was able to recover on a cloud provider’s infrastructure that was sympathetic to their plight and slowly began to attract users back to the platform. Other platforms like Gab and Gettr sprang into prominence and provided safe havens for free speech while Parler was down; the Marxists were powerless to stop them, settling for casting aspersions as the spiritual home of QANON conspiracy theorists (Gab) or laughable attempts of a “deposed” President to maintain relevance (Gettr); undaunted, non-Marxists continue to flock to these platforms and ignore the propaganda. This presents a problem: the free market is working, creating alternatives to Facebook that Marxist-sympathizing corporations and the media can do little about. They can’t control the flow of information on those platforms like they do on their own; this has to change for them. Enter Frances Haugen.
Don’t think for a minute that the usual Capitalist motivations apply to Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, or any of the media bosses. They don’t. These people are the product of a couple of generations of careful anti-Capitalism indoctrination, and truly believe that traditional Capitalism is evil, exploitative, and must be destroyed. They are using the system to destroy the system: they have built companies that are so woven into the fabric of society that they have de facto control of everything. That puts them in a unique position: they can push society in the desired direction straight into Communism. So if they can’t do anything directly about these upstart challengers to their information supremacy, then what can they do? Find a patsy. Let her build up a “damning” report of malfeasance so terrible that “something has to be done”. Along the way, the free-speech upstarts get swept up in the regulation. Sound like a pyrrhic victory? Not really. Here’s the really insidious part: they welcome this.
The simple fact is that anything the government does to “regulate” Facebook is not going to hurt them at all. They have a stupidly gigantic user base that has grown dependent on them, they have entire buildings filled with people who do nothing but deal with regulatory and compliance issues, and they have billions of dollars already. They could care less about “profit”, regardless of what Haugen asserts; they’ll gladly trade a modest amount of profit to achieve what they can’t get any other way: regulation of speech on the “free speech” platforms. What will follow is nothing less than the utter destruction of those platforms. The one thing that makes them attractive to users vs. Facebook will be gone: the government will determine if a post is “extremist” and must be taken down. The platform operator will get crushed with regulatory reports and compliance costs they don’t have now and can’t afford. Facebook is big enough to absorb the hit; Parler, Gettr, ConnectZing and the rest are not.
So while we instinctively respond “there ought to be a law!”, that will play directly into the Marxist’s hands. It’s what they want. They win on all levels: they grow the government’s influence, they eliminate competition, they regain control of information. Don’t fall for it. In the immortal words of Admiral Akbar, “It’s a trap!” (h/t Dan Bongino).