Facebook Insider Reportedly Helped Liberal Media Dox Conservative Man
It was only about two weeks ago that many Democrats and the liberal media expressed their phony sanctimonious outrage over a humorous video. The clip — which went viral on social media — purported to show Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi slurring words as if she were drunk.
Of course, it was falsely linked to and blamed on President Donald Trump.
Amid demands from elected officials that Facebook take down the “doctored” anti-Pelosi video and hours of incensed discussion among media talking heads, an ultra-liberal media outlet set about figuring out and exposing exactly who had posted, if not created, the fake video. The effort reportedly involved help from an unnamed “official” inside Facebook.
The Daily Beast proudly “doxed” and exposed the identity and personal background — including his criminal and employment history, as well as political activism — of Shawn Brooks, a conservative, Trump-supporting black man living in New York City. He was pegged as the genesis of the slurred Pelosi video that caused faux offense among the left.
So-called “journalist” Kevin Poulsen bragged in his article about how he tracked down the man believed responsible for the video, hounded him with messages and requests for an interview, then exposed his identity and personal information after he made it clear that he didn’t want to be publicly identified.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, Poulsen also revealed in his piece that an unnamed “official” at Facebook not only confirmed what Poulsen had learned through his own investigation into a social media user but also provided information about the subject that Poulsen otherwise would have been incapable of discovering.
The first suggestion that Poulsen received help from a Facebook insider came in article’s second and third paragraphs, where it was strongly implied that the Facebook insider had provided a timeline of when the video had first been posted to pages on the platform.
That insider was mentioned again in the sixth paragraph when Poulsen wrote, “It’s conceivable that someone else actually edited the clip. But a Facebook official, confirming a Daily Beast investigation, said the video was first posted on Politics WatchDog directly from Brooks’ personal Facebook account.”
Brooks had denied being the creator or the initial poster of the video, and he said that he was one of several administrators on the conservative-leaning political pages with which he was associated.
The Facebook insider made another appearance in the article, however, by informing Poulsen that other page administrators didn’t exist as real people but instead were puppet accounts Brooks controlled and which the platform had deleted.
Again, the unnecessary doxing of Brooks as the alleged mastermind behind a video that angered all the right people is disgusting and bad enough. The fact that Facebook — more likely a biased employee acting of his or her own accord — contributed to the alleged journalist’s effort to expose a random Trump supporter in liberal New York City makes it worse.
Let’s play a little role-reversal, shall we? Imagine for a moment that an obviously fake and “doctored” video of President Donald Trump went viral on social media — no need to imagine, as there are hundreds currently circulating — and conservative-leaning media outlets sought to find and expose the liberal who created and posted it.
Say, for example, that The Daily Caller or The Daily Wire — or even The Western Journal’s Conservative Tribune — had contacted a Facebook employee with probing questions about the identity and details of its users.
Does anybody think that any Facebook employee — or one from any social media platform — would go out of his or her way to provide personal or technical information to right-leaning outlets to support exposing the hypothetical Trump-hating individual? We already know the answer to that rhetorical question.
The truth is, what The Daily Beast did — allegedly with help from a Facebook insider — is nothing short of disgusting, mean-spirited and the height of partisan hacking. Any and all who were involved — from the “journalist” to his editors to the Facebook insider — should be ashamed of themselves.
Of course, there will be no shame and no apologies from those who worked to publicly expose an anonymous social media user — threatening his life and well-being. They have convinced themselves that the Orange Man is bad, they’re on the “right side of history” and the normal rules of decorum and journalism no longer apply to them.
Truth and Accuracy
We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.
