It's Called Playing the Refs

The Washington Post has an article describing how right-wingers have taken control of Facebook's anti-fake news efforts.

Basically, it's the same game plan that they have been doing for years with the old press.

• Claim bias.
• Coordinate claims.
• Get Republican politicians to threaten the media organizations.

Rinse, lather, repeat:

Facebook created “Project P” — for propaganda — in the hectic weeks after the 2016 presidential election and quickly found dozens of pages that had peddled false news reports ahead of Donald Trump’s surprise victory. Nearly all were based overseas, had financial motives and displayed a clear rightward bent.


In a world of perfect neutrality, which Facebook espouses as its goal, the political tilt of the pages shouldn’t have mattered. But in a videoconference between Facebook’s Washington office and its Silicon Valley headquarters in December 2016, the company’s most senior Republican, Joel Kaplan, voiced concerns that would become familiar to those within the company.


“We can’t remove all of it because it will disproportionately affect conservatives,” said Kaplan, a former George W. Bush White House official and now the head of Facebook’s Washington office, according to people familiar with the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect professional relationships.

………

The debate over “Project P,” which resulted in a few of the worst pages quickly being removed while most others remained on the platform, exemplified the political dynamics that have reigned within Facebook since Trump emerged as the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee to the White House in 2016. A company led mainly by Democrats in the liberal bastion of Northern California repeatedly has tilted rightward to deliver policies, hiring decisions and public gestures sought by Republicans, according to current and former employees and others who have worked closely with the company.

It's easy to define media frauds, and because, as Stephen Colbert so eloquently noted, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias," it means that conservative favored stories are more likely to be false.

Republicans are arguing against impartial standards because they are demanding equality of outcomes, which, unsurprisingly is one of their main complaints about liberals.

F%$# them with Cheney's dick.