I’ve always been careful to play by the rules on Facebook. I’ve avoided posting the kind of content which has led some of my friends to have posts taken down or spend time in “FB jail”. However, over the last couple of months (yes, during the election season), I had several of my FB posts deleted for violating “guidelines“, for “trying to get likes“. The common element in all of these was that I posted a link to a piece in a mainstream media channel, with a short introduction on the subject and why I thought it mattered. (I never post bare links.) Well, we now know that this was a deliberate policy change by Meta to “depoliticize” FB. Of course, channels like X didn’t do anything of the kind (quite the reverse), and so the effect was to shift the overall sharing of content rightwards.

I’m also posting this on FB, and to avoid that FB policy I’ll use a comment to share the link to the Emptywheel piece that includes hard numbers to back up this claim. I’ll also link to this blog piece from Bluesky.

As Marcy points out, “If I’m right about that dynamic — that politics worked but propaganda worked far better — then it means much of the post-election soul-searching is misplaced (and, indeed, a dangerous misallocation of focus). That’s because Harris lost, in part, because of media disfunction, because electoral choice became dissociated from political persuasion more than any recent US election, largely due to an assault on the press and rational thought.”