It is considered a historical certainty on the right that during President Obama’s first term, the IRS pursued a political vendetta against conservative advocacy groups seeking non-profit status. It is even common to hear Republicans imply that politically motivated targeting of Tea Party groups may have cost Mitt Romney the 2012 presidential election.

In reality, the IRS “scandal” was the unhappy byproduct of an agency being tasked with determining the validity of claims to non-profit status, but lacking the proper resources to do it or clear guidance on how. The fact that new Tea Party groups, many with dubious claim to non-profit status, had flooded the IRS with applications compounded the difficulty. The agency thus used watchwords like “tea party” and “progressive” to, in its words, triage the workload.



Mythmaking summons more outrage, sharpens a sense of victimization, and thus creates a larger appetite for right-wing electioneering groups and more conspiracy theories.

For the purposes of ginning up voters, that story is much less useful than one in which a liberal agency leader masterminded a sabotage campaign against patriotic conservatives trying to rescue the country from Obama. And so the IRS scandal was born.

Flash forward to this week, when John Thune, chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, launched an inquiry into Facebook’s “trending topics” after an anonymous, conservative former Facebook worker told Gawker Media that the social media giant empowered reviewers to suppress conservative news and blacklist conservative news sources on the basis of naked political bias. The GOP’s intense interest in imposing content neutrality on a private company has inspired comparisons to the defunct “fairness doctrine” that used to regulate public-affairs content on U.S. airwaves. Republican beneficiaries of conservative talk radio turned the fairness doctrine into a free-speech bogeyman, but they take a much kinder view of the concept if it can be used to reduce alleged liberal bias online.

At a glance, the IRS and Facebook “scandals” bear little resemblance to one another—but the imperative both organizations face to sort truth from fiction creates a key similarity. Facebook has denied the core allegation fairly strongly. But it is easy to imagine how a conservative Facebooker might see his coworkers manipulating Facebook trending topics, and walk away convinced of a conspiracy exactly like the one the right imagines unfolded at the IRS.