Ted Cruz has identified the central problem with Facebook. It’s not the social platform’s lack of accountability, its willingness to violate the privacy of millions of users or even its facilitation of genocide.
No, Facebook’s biggest sin is that it’s not nice to homophobic fast-food chains.
At Tuesday’s Senate hearing with Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the Texas Republican took Zuckerberg to task for “a pervasive pattern of bias and political censorship.”
According to Cruz, Facebook shut down a Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day page that was started by failed presidential candidate Mike Huckabee. This outrage happened six years ago, in the heat of the Chick-Fil-A marriage controversy, which Huckabee was trying to capitalize on.
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According to the site that reported it, the page was down for all of 12 hours. The horror!
Cruz also complained that Facebook blocked more than two dozen Catholic pages as well as the page of Diamond and Silk, a sister duo that produces videos praising President Trump. In the latter case, the page was never blocked, although sisters did get a note saying their content was “unsafe,” a mistake that Facebook has since corrected.
Cruz also pressed Zuckerberg about the firing of Palmer Luckey, a 24-year-old virtual reality whiz who was fired from Facebook earlier this year. Luckey raised money for candidate Trump and showed an affinity for alt-right themes on Twitter. Zuckerberg said that Luckey was fired for personal reasons unrelated to his politics.
Needless to say, Cruz made no mention of Facebook’s regular targeting of LGBT speech, let alone the time it banned a photo of two men kissing. Apparently, those can’t compare to love songs to grilled nuggets.
