Michelle Goldberg looks at Trump's neofascist demand that Google, Facebook, YouTube and other social-media behemoths be regulated because of their supposed left-wing slant. (Trump's latest obsession came from Fox Business Network's Lou Dobbs, who in turn got his information from a laughable PJ Media blog post, titled "96 Percent of Google Search Results for 'Trump' News Are From Liberal Media Outlets." The post is laughable because of how it defines "liberal." Notes Goldberg: "[It] puts Infowars, Alex Jones’s conspiracy website, closer to the center than Time magazine.")
The reality of social-media content is, but of course, far different from the fevered imaginations of PJ Media, Lou Dobbs and Donald J. Trump. Goldberg quotes Yochai Benkler, a professor at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society and coauthor of the book, Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics:
"There’s a lot more objectively false statements being made and replicated in right-wing media," says Benkler. "Any algorithm targeting fake news [would therefore] have a disparate impact on right-wing media."
So, Donald, should we let the algorithms targeting fake news begin, as long as they're targeting "objectively false statements"?