Grandstanding GOP Senators Continue To Mislead About Social Media Bias, Demand A 'Fairness Doctrine' For The Internet
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190410/23045941974/grandstanding-gop-senators-continue-to-mislead-about-social-media-bias-demand-fairness-doctrine-internet.shtml
We've talked for a while about the sheer silliness of (mainly) Republican politicians whining about supposed "anti-conservative bias" on social media platforms. As we've pointed out, the actual evidence hasn't shown any evidence of bias. The random anecdotal examples of badly moderated content have mostly just shown how difficult it is to do content moderation at scale. The "bad" moderation decisions impact lots of folks across the political spectrum -- it's just that some grandstanding Republicans like to engage in confirmation bias (the only actual bias that seems to be occurring here) to suggest the moderation mistakes are politically motivated. We've pointed out multiple times now that crying wolf on this issue is not a good look for conservatives -- on multiple levels.
Beyond the fact that the evidence seems to disprove the claims of bias (oh, and yet another study has shown no evidence of bias), for years these very same Republicans kept attacking the idea of the "fairness doctrine," which was an FCC rule in place for a few decades, demanding "equal representation" of political views on the public airwaves. It hasn't been in place for a while, but for a few years, this same group of Republicans grandstanded about false claims that Democrats were trying to bring it back. And yet, what they seem to be demanding now is the return of the fairness doctrine, but in an even more ridiculous way. Rather than on the public airwaves -- where at the very least there was some legitimate claim to the government being able to set some conditions -- these Senators now seem to want to force private companies to run businesses the way they want them to. What a bunch of hypocrites.