Breitbart Tech’s Allum Bokhari: Facebook Claims to Be Open to Regulation, but They Mean Anti-Conservative Globalist Regulation

Breitbart News Senior Tech Correspondent Allum Bokhari joined Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow on SiriusXM Patriot’s Breitbart News Daily, Friday, to discuss Silicon Valley’s double standard on free speech and regulation.

“Mark Zuckerberg’s promise to the public is zero transparency and zero public accountability. He floated that he might be interested or might think its a good thing for the government to regulate him and to regulate Facebook, but Allum, what is the deal here?” asked Marlow. “He gives his speech, he’s talking about the data breach or whatever it was, and he doesn’t seem to be committing to anything aside from Facebook investigating itself.”

“Yeah, this is exactly what he did when he had the trending news scandal in 2016, when Facebook was accused by one of its own employees of discriminating against conservative news sources,” replied Bokhari. “Facebook was under pressure from the Senate, so he announced an internal investigation, basically investigated itself and found itself innocent, surprise surprise. So he’s trying to do the same thing here. But the comments Facebook are making, not just Zuckerberg but also Sheryl Sandberg, about wanting to be regulated, it’s interesting, but the question is what kind of regulation are they talking about?”

“Is it going to be regulation from the Democrats or regulation from the Republicans? I think conservatives and the left and the globalist establishment want very different things from Facebook,” he continued. “I think the globalist establishment want Facebook to exert more editorial control over their platform, they want them to do more suppression of conservative media, and they want less free speech. I think they’re the people that Facebook is responding to. It’s pressure from them. They’re not asking their users anymore what they think, what they want to see on their news feed. They’re not giving users more power, they’re responding to Democratic senators, and advertising conglomerates, and corporate media. Those are the people that Facebook listens to at the moment, at least it seems that way with how everything changes.”

“So when they ask for regulation I think that’s what they’re talking about. It’s not regulation that will make Facebook freer, more open, more of a neutral platform,” Bokhari claimed. “It will make it less of those things.”

Marlow then responded, “So it sounds like what Zuckerberg is trying to do is diffuse the news cycle, and he also achieved it… The world is moving on; there are a million things to talk about. We can talk about trade, we can talk about McMaster and Bolton, we can talk about this omnibus bill… stock turbulence, stocks are down big yesterday, there are so many things in the news that Zuckerberg is hoping this thing just sort of goes away, and then he can go back to his business, but I don’t know if he’s going to be quite that lucky.”

“He really is just playing this politician out there where he’s saying, ‘We’re going to do this investigation.’ Who are the investigators? Oh, it just so happens to be Facebook. It’s going to be investigating themselves. I mean what is actually changing here?” expressed Marlow. “What is he proposing that is a hard and fast change that could potentially lead to some transparency from these masters of the universe?”

“Well he hasn’t promised transparency, he’s promised to do an internal audit of applications and developers who had access to user data before 2014, and before 2014 is important because prior to 2014 Facebook had very lax rules on the amount of data that third-party applications could access,” explained Bokhari. “So if I used and installed an app prior to 2014, many of those apps would’ve asked the user for permission to not only view their data but also the news feed and information and personal information from their friends. So these apps not only had permission to view information from the user who installed the app, but they also had permission to view the information from their friends, who hadn’t consented to that. So that’s the real issue that Mark Zuckerberg is trying to address.”

“Now the focus of the story has been on Cambridge Analytica, and alleged involvement with the Trump campaign. They say they didn’t use any data to support Donald Trump, or in the 2016 election at all. But one campaign that definitely did use Facebook’s data at a time when they did have those weak data protection rules was the Obama campaign in 2012, because that was before Facebook tightened their rules in 2014,” he continued. “And we have a former Obama staffer who oversaw the campaign’s data analytics programs who essentially said that they were able to scoop the entire social network’s social graph from Facebook, that’s data on virtually everyone, every American citizen on the platform, and strange there was no mention of that from Mark Zuckerberg or from Facebook, which has an extraordinary amount of ex-Obama staffers on their payroll.”

Marlow agreed, declaring, “And this is, Allum, what I think is a pattern when it comes to media bias, when it comes to corporate bias, and when it comes to entertainment bias, is that you’re allowed to have opinions so long as they’re left-wing opinions. You’re allowed to have a system that favors one political party so long as it’s the Democratic party.”

“That’s what’s been exposed here, the hypocrisy that this was happening under Obama and no one cared, and it took the fact that Donald Trump and his allies like Cambridge Analytica, like Breitbart, were able to use some of the tools developed by the globalist Silicon Valley elite to their advantage and to beat Silicon Valley elite at their own game,” he concluded. “That’s why this is getting attention now. It’s a point that bears repeating over and over and over, that this isn’t just about right and wrong, this isn’t just about data collection and power and transparency, this is about the fact that conservatives are using these very expensive tools that are created by left of center people to vanquish the left of center agenda. That’s why the outrage is happening; it really isn’t even about the data. They aren’t outraged about the data because they weren’t outraged when Obama was using it for these exact purposes. They’re outraged that President Trump’s allies are using it to beat Democrats.”