How Apple News and other tech giants change the narrative for Democrats

Remember that time before the 2020 election when everyone was focused on social media election interference?

Including the fact that The New York Post had our accounts locked and our stories suppressed.

One of the results of all that was Elon Musk buying Twitter in an effort to rebalance the social media landscape.

Because everyone knew that Twitter, like that dumpster-fire called Wikipedia, was insanely politically partisan.

But there is just as much election interference going on now.

And it is time the Republican Party got on top of it.

Not least if they want to have a fair run in the midterms.

Because as anyone who uses social media will know there is still a lot of funny-business going on.

Where there was once flagrant distortion of the news, a number of the Big Tech companies are now doing things in a far more subtle and insidious way.

Take Apple.

For months I’ve been wondering why Apple keeps pushing me stories I have absolutely no desire to read.

Why does it keep offering me stories from the Guardian, BBC and other left-wing news-sites?

An Apple logo adorns the facade of the downtown Brooklyn Apple store on March 14, 2020, in New York. AP

Why is Apple so intent on pushing me stories from the Huffington Post?

A left-leaning blog no one has read, or heard from, in years.

Come to think of it, why does Apple keep pushing a lifestyle magazine for the over-50s onto me?

The cheek.

I don’t mind reading a variety of news.

In fact it’s part of my job to do so.

But why is the pushing all going in one political direction?

The New York Post this week revealed one of the reasons.

Which is that Apple has set up a sneaky little system of its own, to make sure that their customers get indoctrinated in one political direction.

A study showed that out of 166 articles pushed by Apple News over a two-week period exactly half came from left-leaning outlets.

Most of the rest came from “centrist” news sources.

Not one of the stories in the carefully curated “top news” stories section came from an outlet that would be classified as “right-leaning.”

In January Apple’s top stories consisted of 620 stories from left-leaning and other news sources.

Exactly zero stories came from any outlet that could be described as right-leaning.

Among other tricks Apple tries to justify this by rating news sources on their “trustworthiness.”

And who could have guessed that conservative or other right-leaning outlets are consistently graded as “untrustworthy”?

While almost any left-wing news-site will be graded as the most trustworthy news sources of all time.

In this photo illustration, the Apple News logo is displayed on a mobile phone screen in front of a computer screen displaying the Apple logo. Anadolu via Getty Images

Funny coincidence, that.

The thing is that all this has a massive impact not just on the news that people absorb, but on the political priorities of the public.

Consider the way in which the story of the Minnesota Somali fraud scandal turned around.

For a few days everyone was focused on it.

Tim Walz and others seemed to be under some genuine political pressure for allowing fraud on a gargantuan scale to take place in that state.

Then suddenly the story was all about ICE.

And every news story being pushed our way seemed to be about how horrible ICE are and how noble the people are who had come out on the streets to shout abuse at them.

Was that a coincidence?

Was it organic?

It didn’t feel like it.

It felt entirely manipulated.

And indeed it was.

Because big tech companies can — if they want — completely change the narrative.

Without the American public even knowing that we are being manipulated.

Occasionally when a company like Apple is shamed for this they will try a quick correction.

Last week Apple chose to push one story from Fox News.

About the tragic death of “Dawson’s Creek” actor James van der Beek.

But that is hardly a story which is going to have any political slant to it.

And so all that Apple were really doing was throwing in one story from a right-leaning source in order to make their bias look slightly less obscene.

But as America gears up for the midterm elections lawmakers should take a closer look at what is really going on here.

Because social media bosses, like our law-makers, are very good about bemoaning our “divided” and “fractured” society.

They are far less good at identifying why this fracturing is happening.

One of the key reasons is that social media has caused a shift in news in recent years.

Where once we had different opinions on things, now we have different facts.

The social media companies are trying to push one set of “facts” onto the American people.

But they are “facts” which demonstrably all go in one political direction.

As voters go to the polls in November which set of “facts” will we be pushed our way by the tech giants?

The midterms are likely to be decided by voters’ attitudes towards the economy and the cost of living.

If voters feel that they are better off than they were two years earlier then the Republicans will benefit at the polls.

If people feel poorer then the Democrats will have a good run.

But a lot of the truth about consumer confidence, people’s spending and more comes down to attitude: whether we think things are getting better or not.

And a lot of that comes down to whether or not people are being told that the economy is going well or not.

It is very easy indeed to manipulate economic data.

Even easier than it is to manipulate a social media algorithm.

If the social media giants continue to line up against any “right-wing” or “conservative” news source then much of the voting public will be getting less than half of the actual story.

Perhaps it is time for a committee — lead by the vice president, or someone else in the administration — to look into all this.

They could start by hauling the tech giants in front of them and asking them what the hell is going on.

Because the administration — and more importantly the American public — deserve to know.