If Facebook discriminated against conservative-friendly news items, mused The New Republic’s Brian Beutler in a Friday article, it almost certainly had good reason to do so, given the abundance of nonsense that right-wingers unleash on the Web.

“The differences between mainstream and liberal political content on the one hand, and conservative content on the other, [are] critical,” wrote Beutler. “Facebook reviewers tasked with ‘disregard[ing] junk…hoaxes or subjects with insufficient sources’ are going to ensnare more climate-change denialism, more birther stories, more racist Breitbart agitprop than anything comparably dubious that comes out of the liberal internet. And those dubious stories will come not just from fringe sites or content farms, but from prestige outlets of the online right.”

Beutler hinted that when conservatives claim that an institution has treated them unfairly, they’re also consciously promoting the larger righty cause: “Mythmaking around both the IRS and Facebook flaps summons more outrage, sharpens a sense of victimization, and thus creates a larger appetite for right-wing electioneering groups and conspiracy theories. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle of bullshit.”

From Beutler’s piece (bolding added):