News/Commentary

‘Facebook was like a Democratic institution’: The ‘explicit goal’ was to get Obama elected

May 3, 2023 | | Print Article

Former BuzzFeed editor-in-chief and New York Times columnist Ben Smith came right out and admitted to MSNBC host Alex Wagner on Tuesday that the left’s goal in using Facebook was to get former President Obama elected and said the social media giant was “like a Democratic institution.”

(Video Credit: MSNBC)

Buzzfeed is now defunct just as so many other leftist media outlets are or soon will be. Smith left the New York Times in 2022. He is also the co-founder of the leftist news site Semafor and has a new book out on the digital age called “Traffic” that he is hawking. He is evidently making some candid admissions as he plugs it as well.

Smith claimed that while he was researching his new book, the one thing that surprised him the most “was going back and seeing that there was this early Internet scene where to some degree the explicit goal was to elect Barack Obama.”

“For the Huffington Post, that was part of the point,” he claimed. “And everyone just took for granted in that world that these were college kids, young people, newly on the Internet — they were Democrats.”

Recounting that Obama even visited Facebook, Smith noted, “It sort of went without saying that Facebook was like a Democratic institution.”

He went on to elaborate that “everybody thought” during Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign that the perceived high point of “this new digital world” was “the election of Barack Obama.” He asserted that looking back, it was apparent that “the high point, the crowning achievement of this sort of new social media world is the election of Donald Trump” in 2016.

Smith also noted that a number of the “characters” of the early Internet, which include Vice co-founder Gavin McInnes, who also was part of the Proud Boys, and Huffington Post co-founder Andrew Breitbart, later went on to conceive “these new culture wars” and “in some ways” they “adopted the lessons more fully than most people on the left.” He also stated that the social media tools “turned out to be just perfect for serving this very angry moment” during the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election. He specifically pointed toward Facebook as pivotal during political races.

The former Buzzfeed editor remarked that Facebook got “freaked out by it” because it felt that what it deemed “fake news” was bolstering the right and hurting the left. That caused the social media giant to start “tweaking its dials to say, ‘Wait, we don’t want people sharing fake stories about Hillary Clinton body doubles. We want like more meaningful stories which people engage with.'”

“And then what that would be was like a Donald Trump meme and you replying ‘kill yourself’ in the comments and then that being shared to everybody because the algorithm has decided that you are deeply engaged,” he disingenuously concluded.

He’s repeating his talking points on multiple leftist media outlets.

The gist of what Smith seems to have told Wagner is that Republicans are to blame for what he sees as the demise of social media and the digital age. Wagner and Smith both hammered individuals on the right such as Steve Bannon, intimating they were always in it for the money, not for the conservative cause.

Somehow, Smith and the left are trying to twist the narrative and rewrite history claiming that the right has pretty much controlled social media since before former President Trump was elected, which is obviously not the case. Both Facebook and Twitter were originally created and controlled by leftists who demonstrably censored conservatives and squelched their voices for political gain.

Speaking of self-serving, cringy promotional efforts:

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