The tech industry is slowly circling conservative media and preparing to strike.
An advertising program manager for Microsoft responded to an op-ed by New York Times contributor Farhad Manjoo, agreeing that Fox News was a “million pound fork-tongued colossus” responsible for misinformation. Dare Obasanjo, listed on LinkedIn as a project program manager for Microsoft, tweeted out that Fox News and figures like Ben Shapiro were “misleading propaganda.”
Obasanjo compared the mocking video of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to videos put out by both Fox News and Ben Shapiro. Obasanjo claimed that the edited clip, which was slowed down, was disinformation. He then likened it to the supposed disinformation put out by conservative media.
Manjoo wrote for The Times that unlike most of liberal journalists, he was not convinced that the Nancy Pelosi video was a problem on Facebook. Instead, he argued that Facebook was merely a symptom of “the disease.” The disease was Fox News.
Manjoo whined that “we don’t have much hope nor many good ideas for limiting the lies of old-media outlets like Fox News.” He found a video aired on Lou Dobbs of Nancy Pelosi which he claimed was also “deceptively edited.”
The problem, according to Manjoo, was that Fox “still commands the complete and slavish attention of tens of millions of Americans every night, polluting the public square with big and small lies that often ricochet across every platform, from cable to YouTube to Facebook to Google, drowning us all in a never-ending flood of fakery.”
Obasanjo took this same position, saying that “80 percent of Fox News videos” should also be taken down from Facebook. However, while the majority of his complaints were about Fox News, they seemed to apply to other traditional forms of media as well. He mentioned that videos by The Times were also deceptively edited. This was nested in a complaint about journalists who “pick on Facebook while ignoring more egregious stuff (Fox News, NYT, etc).”
Microsoft has a culture that seems to encourage censorship. After the New Zealand massacre, Microsoft President Brad Smith said he wanted to build a search engine that would automatically filter out “unacceptable” content.
