Bokhari: Mark Zuckerberg’s Rapidly Increasing Overreach

Is Mark Zuckerberg’s God complex getting worse? Every day seems to bring a new, mind-boggling act of overreach from Facebook.

This week, the company seemingly decided that the U.S. constitution doesn’t matter, as it decided to suppress “unlawful” protests against coronavirus lockdowns.

Unlawful protests? Perhaps it’s been a while since Zuckerberg read it, but I think I remember something about a “right of citizens to assembly peaceably” in the First Amendment.

Earlier in the month, Facebook decided that the President of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, wasn’t saying the right things about the Chinese virus pandemic, and removed several of the head of state’s posts. Facebook insists that it will transmit official information about the virus to its users — it’s just that some “officials” are too populist, you see!

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. This is, after all, a company that believes it is so important, it should have its own supreme court.

It’s also a company whose CEO is happy to act as the world’s editor-in-chief, deciding what news stories are of sufficient importance to be heard on the platform. Breitbart News extensively covered Facebook’s suppression of stories about the alleged whistleblower Eric Ciaramella.

After its ban on all mentions of the alleged whistleblower, Facebook assured the world that once enough public figures mentioned his name, the ban would be lifted. And yet it wasn’t, even after President Donald Trump tweeted out an article naming Ciaramella as the alleged whistleblower.

Being the world’s editor-in-chief isn’t enough for Mark Zuckerberg, though — in the age of Wuhan coronavirus pandemic, he’s set himself up as the world’s Chief Medical Officer as well, deciding what information (and misinformation) about the pandemic gets through to Facebook users.

And we already see the result of allowing one, progressive-dominated company to have that level of power. When Bolsonaro expresses skepticism about social distancing, his posts get deleted. But when the mainstream media repeatedly spreads misinformation and fake news about the virus, they don’t even get “fact-checked.”

With great power comes great responsibility, and Facebook appears to have none of the latter. It’s time for America’s leaders to take seriously the danger of having this out-of-control company in charge of the global flow of information at this dangerous point in our history.