As Twitchy reported, Facebook on Thursday announced that it had banned accounts belonging to Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Louis Farrakhan, all three of whom were lumped together in a Washington Post headline as “far-right leaders.” The Washington Post eventually deleted its tweet and changed it to read “extremist leaders.”

Robby Starbuck makes a great point; why not refer to Louis Farrakhan as the far-left extremist that he is? Notice how you always hear “alt-right” thrown around to describe people like Ben Shapiro, but you never hear the media write about the alt-left?

Notice that even @washingtonpost’s correction refuses to re-label Farrakhan as far-left. They simply go with "extremist" instead. Why is the media willing to label some folks far-right but unwilling to label others far-left? pic.twitter.com/OLAnvkgVVT — Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) May 2, 2019

It’s nice that the Washington Post could be bothered to correct the record, but Ted Frank has written an interesting thread on why so many media outlets just went with it.

THREAD: why is everyone calling Farrakhan “far right”? I have no inside information, but what happened is pretty obvious and easy to reverse-engineer if you’ve seen sausage being made in crisis communications. /1 — (((tedfrank))) (@tedfrank) May 2, 2019

1) Facebook has a PR problem: everyone is mad at it because Nazis and Alex Jones types are using the site profitably. Employees are probably even madder about it internally than the external pressure from politicians. /2 — (((tedfrank))) (@tedfrank) May 2, 2019

2) So Facebook convenes meetings and decides to have a purge-the-far-right policy. Someone comes up with a list, perhaps culled from SPLC (though not indiscriminately doing some spotcnecks) and other bad publicity, maybe internal complaints. /3 — (((tedfrank))) (@tedfrank) May 2, 2019

3) Media relations notes that the policy solves a PR problem they’ve been having, so issues an embargoed briefing to a bunch of reporters giving them a heads up that they’ll be banning a lot of far right wing accounts. /4 — (((tedfrank))) (@tedfrank) May 2, 2019

4) Meanwhile a token conservative at one of the Facebook meetings points out that FB is also getting grief from Republicans about bias, and that banning only one side of the aisle could create other political problems. /5 — (((tedfrank))) (@tedfrank) May 2, 2019

So FB finds a token to also ban who isn’t affiliated with the right, picks Farrakhan, plugs him into the list. But the internal policy is still “purge the far right” and that’s how it’s been explained to the communications staffers who in turn explain it to the media. /6 — (((tedfrank))) (@tedfrank) May 2, 2019

5) The communications staffers are in their own California bubble and don’t change the thrust of the briefing even after inserting Farrakhan’s name into the list as an edit. /7 — (((tedfrank))) (@tedfrank) May 2, 2019

6) The media is in a hurry and takes the description at face value and parrots the press release without questioning it because it’s faster than doing real reporting, and, besides, why would you ban someone who isn’t far right, since all right wingers are evil? /8 — (((tedfrank))) (@tedfrank) May 2, 2019

7) Add careless copy editing, and bingo, multiple media outlets simultaneously publish stories and tweets and headlines calling Farrakhan “far right.” Be happy that the echo chamber remembered to also ban Farrakhan as a sop to pretend there wasn’t bias in original decision. /fin — (((tedfrank))) (@tedfrank) May 2, 2019

Sounds plausible to us, especially the part about the media being too lazy to question the press release, which is probably why Ben Shapiro is so often lumped in the with “alt-right.”

This seems more likely than not https://t.co/DxcgdlhRHy — PoliMath (@politicalmath) May 2, 2019

To someone who thinks he's on "the left," everything bad comes from "the right."

Unfortunately, the terms left and right haven't been useful since the 18th century French National Assembly.

A scale from anarchist to totalitarian would be better. — Bert Hyman (@berthyman) May 2, 2019

Because he's a racist anti-Semite and the Right is where you put all the monsters. — ((DarkTechObserver)) (@DarkTechMonitor) May 2, 2019

Also Farrakhan will probably be back on Facebook eventually. — Nick Carroll (@LibertyAndTech) May 2, 2019

The Women’s March will probably lobby for that.

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