White House Takes Conservative Internet Grievance Culture to Next Level, Launches Tool to Report Digital Censorship

Are you a right-wing bigot who has seen your content censored on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, or Twitter? Are you a right-wing bigot who has not seen your content censored on those platforms, but you’re also paranoid beyond reason and convinced that the lack of response to your extremely important posting is evidence of blatant censoring?

Good news! You can now report this censorship to the f**$#@#$ White House.

That’s not a joke. From The Verge:

On Wednesday, the White House launched a new tool for people to use if they feel they’ve been wrongly censored, banned, or suspended on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

“Too many Americans have seen their accounts suspended, banned, or fraudulently reported for unclear ‘violations’ of user policies,” the site reads. “No matter your views, if you suspect political bias caused such an action to be taken against you, share your story with President Trump.”

This is an actual website for actual people to submit their actual gripes, it’s called a “Tech Bias Story Sharing Too,” and you can find it here.

Now, anyone who knows anything about the Internet knows that this site will be inundated with complaints from two kinds of people:

1. Crackpots

2. Pranksters

And the margins will be about 300:1 in favor of the pranksters.

This has been a hobbyhorse of Republicans for some time, from Trump kvetching about his follower count on Twitter to Jack Dorsey himself, to the litany of legislators who have grilled tech CEOs about this so-called bias:

Over the past few months, Republicans have taken aim at social media networks, citing claims that conservatives have been wrongly censored on these platforms. Some committees, like House Energy and Commerce and Senate Judiciary, have even held hearings on the issue where lawmakers questioned officials from companies like Facebook and Twitter over the alleged bias.

The outrage started last April when the House Judiciary Committee invited pro-Trump online personalities Diamond and Silk to discuss being “censored” on social media. This spun off into the Senate where Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) later made it a key policy issue by holding a hearing with Facebook and Twitter executives to discuss the alleged bias. Only two Democrats attended the hearing where other Republicans like Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) questioned the representatives on why specific posts from their offices or from conservative films were taken down.

You can read this a couple of ways…it’s either a concerted attempt to bolster conservatism by spreading the longstanding grievance culture to digital realms, or the last dying groans of a party that knows they have all but forfeited these platforms to younger generations, who are overwhelmingly more progressive than their parents and grandparents. It’s probably both, and it almost definitely won’t work, but maybe they can make a final stand on Facebook, which has become the realm of Russian propaganda ops and the homegrown, Breitbart-style fake news that Trump and his ilk actually like.