House Dem Mocks GOP’s ‘Obsessive Persecution Complex’ During Tech Hearing, Notes Right-Wing Media Dominates Top Facebook Posts
House Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) mocked his Republican colleagues’ “obsessive persecution complex” about online censorship during the House Judiciary Committee’s tech antitrust hearing, pointing out that conservative sites routinely dominate the list of top posts on Facebook.
During the Wednesday hearing, the House Democrat focused most of his five minutes addressing the leaders of Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, and YouTube not on asking questions but instead on dispelling a popular myth among conservatives. To begin his time, Raskin referred to Richard Hofstadter’s seminal essay on right-wing ideological thinking: The Paranoid Style on American Politics.
“I suppose it is futile to try to cure the obsessive persecution complex and victimology of some of our colleagues,” Raskin said, before pointing to the overwhelming dominance of conservative media on Facebook, using that day’s results as an example. “But they should check out these top performing Facebook link posts by the United States pages today or yesterday or any day for the last week. In seven out of the ten each day, they are right-wing sites: Ben Shapiro, Fox News, Ben Shapiro, Blue Lives Matter and so on.”
“If facebook is out there trying to repress conservative speech, they’re doing a terrible job at it,” Raskin snarked. “So i don’t understand the endless whining about how Facebook and Twitter are somehow discriminating against conservatives.”
Raskin then turned to the recent removal of several tweets by President Donald Trump and his son, Donald Jr.—whose account was briefly suspended—which Twitter took down because they promoted a video of a doctor’s false and baseless conspiracy theories about Covid-19 and the wearing of masks. Facebook and YouTube also removed the video citing its public health disinformation as the reason.
“That was an absolute public health measure which I hope all of us would endorse,” Raskin said of the social media giant’s actions. “We don’t want anybody, including the President of the United States, spreading false information about Covid-19. [Conservatives] essentially destroy their own case when they pick that as their cause for going after all of you.”
Watch the video above, via PBS.
from Mediaite https://ift.tt/309CcQr
0 comments