Last week, Beck and 16 other conservatives met with Zuckerberg at a damage control meeting the tech billionaire called following reports from several Facebook whistleblowers that the site’s news curators actively suppress conservative stories in their “trending” news section while simultaneously boosting the signal of leftwing causes like Black Lives Matter.
Beck’s subsequent defense of Facebook and panning of his fellow conservatives at the meeting led some on the right to label him Zuckerberg’s “useful idiot.”
Tucker Carlson, who also attended the meeting, described Beck’s behavior as “the most extended assiduous suck-up I think I’ve ever seen a grown man commit.”
Carlson told Politico that Beck “acted like he was auditioning to be Mark Zuckerberg’s manservant.”
Beck fired back at Carlson this morning, accusing him of wanting to force “quotas” on Facebook, which, according to Beck, makes him a “progressive.”
“What [Tucker Carlson] is saying about what he said at the meeting is not true,” Beck stated. “It was quotas that he was talking about — quotas. Three percent of the population is Mormon. That was his quote — three percent. So I’m not saying that we go there that far, but shouldn’t it be representative of how many conservatives there are? Shouldn’t you hire that way? That’s a quota. Quotas don’t work. Quotas don’t work. And the only ones that believe that are progressives on the right and progressives on the left. And they’ve already exposed themselves. Progressives are who progressives are and they always will be.”
Carlson, however, claims that he was simply suggesting that Facebook hire news curators with a broader “diversity of views” in order to avoid the sort of leftwing bias they’ve been accused of. His suggestion is in keeping with decades of conservative media criticism and activism from respected organizations like Brent Bozell’s Media Research Center and Breitbart’s own Big Journalism.
Beck also argued that Facebook has a leftwing bias simply because it is “by design a social platform,” and he believes people on the left use social media more than conservatives.
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