Not today, Facebook, or indeed any other day, thank you.

Quite apart from wondering how, in the dead of night, when nobody’s around to hear or see, R*cky G*rv**s feels about having become the favourite comedian of the far right, we must never forget that there’s no greater engine of far right extremism than good old Facebook.

Really, the amount of intrepid, and yes genuinely valuable reporting into gab, parler, the chans and so on is colossal, but it’s all a drop in the ocean compared to yer mum and dad’s favourite, Facebook, purely on the basis of it’s GIANT reach, and the fact that it’s repeatedly…

…and tirelessly deflected attempts not only to moderate disinformation, hate speech and political extremism, but also to prevent it from being allowed to dress itself up as fluffy and fun for an apolitical audience by stealing content.

And, on those occasions where a millimetre of ground is given, it’s done so on the false basis that there’s an equal and opposite problem with ‘extreme left views’, something that is never substantiated by anyone at all, and a load of civil rights campaigners are punished.

NB, this auto played off the back of a friends only video of my kids playing. I have never visited B*n Sh*p*r*’s page, nor any other far right pages - the point here is that Facebook is very actively pushing these sources through ‘fluffy’ (and stolen) content.

You might remember that this was a tactic of the extremist group Britain First - they made memes saying stuff like ‘share if you support our hard-working nurses’ or whatever, which were shared HUGELY widely by people who had no idea what BF was, directing literally millions of…

…pairs of eyeballs to their page which was filled with extremist propaganda. The fact that, rather than see this and find a way to stamp it out, Facebook actually took the model and integrated it into the central functions of their timeline, is *hugely* revealing.

TLDR, Facebook works very, very hard to make sure political extremism is widely promoted by its algorithm, and we must never forget that.