Our friend Sonny Bunch has an essay in The Bulwark referring to a kerfuffle over the weekend in which Catholic writer Sohrab Ahmari alleged that Amazon was hiding his (conservative) book from search results for ideological reasons. Though others discovered other right-wing materials that were hard to find in a search, this turned out to be a glitch that was fixed the same day, and affected a wide variety of products across ideological grounds. The glitch even made it impossible for Sonny to find The Underground Railroad, the Amazon-produced miniseries that is pretty much the single most promoted item on Amazon these days. Sonny draws from this a lesson that ideological siloing can conceal from us the truth.
Fair enough, but Sonny’s suggestion is that each side of the ideological divide is equally susceptible to being blinded by its priors. I’d say we all know that Silicon Valley companies such as Amazon are avowedly on the Left and in the last few months they have taken a big step toward codifying their ideology in their services, overtly and aggressively moving forward to silence undesirables on the right. President Trump is banned from Twitter and Facebook, and we’re all supposed to just get used to this being the case indefinitely; Facebook restricted dissemination of a (true, or at least undenied and unrebutted) New York Post story about what it found on Hunter Biden’s laptop, and Twitter not only banned the story, it shut down the New York Post‘s account for weeks during an election season in a fit of pique about the damage done to Twitter ownership’s favorite political party, then after the election said, “Oops. Sorry, shouldn’t have done that.”
You will pardon me if I don’t think the issue Sonny discusses is equally of concern to both sides. Yes, Fox News did, briefly, go nuts with a false claim that Joe Biden was going to take away our hamburgers, but it did correct itself after a couple of days instead of spending months repeatedly doubling down on a far more consequential lie — the ridiculous false story so much of the media promoted about the “Florida whistleblower” Rebekah Jones. These two media miscues are not equivalent.
Sonny does mention in passing that Amazon admitted pulling a respected book on transgenderism, Ryan T. Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally, but seems blind to the massive change this represents. Amazon yanked the book for ideological incorrectness. Once that principle of thought-policing is established at our largest bookseller, it is not at all implausible that the Sohrab Ahmaris of the world might be next. Amazon also seems to have disappeared from its streaming service a perfectly normal and mainstream (and first-rate) documentary on Clarence Thomas that last May aired on PBS, hardly a hotbed of extremism. Amazon has, as far as I can tell, still not even acknowledged that it pulled the Thomas documentary, much less offered an explanation. The disappearance of that film has been widely discussed in the media, including in this Wall Street Journal column by Jason L. Riley — hardly a fringe blog post — and Amazon has continued to stonewall the matter. (I’ll be happy to correct this piece if Amazon has in fact responded on the matter.)
We’ve got a much bigger problem than ideological confirmation bias (though that is a problem, and I do not claim to be immune to it). The principle conduits of information in this country are shutting down access to disfavored ideas and people, and it isn’t a bug.
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