Tucker Carlson accuses Facebook of 'ideological warfare' - here's why

Fox News host Tucker Carlson decried the actions of Facebook as "ideological warfare" as many conservatives sites saw their traffic from the social networking site collapse after a change in their algorithm governing news.

Here's what he said

"Just about everybody in the country has got a smartphone," said Carlson, "spending a day without going online is unfathomable to almost all of us. Tech rules our lives to an ever greater degree."

"But the so called digital frontier is getting fenced in," he continued, "it's not quite as broad as we were told it would be. A handful of companies now have almost total control over what we can say, do, or see on the internet. Control of almost all human information."

"Consider Facebook," he added. "About half the country uses it as a primary news source. Millions and millions of people understand the world through Facebook. But Facebook is not a neutral host - it has a political agenda."

"Earlier this day Facebook altered its algorithms for what news stories its users see, and the results conclusively have been devastating for conservatives online," he explained. "Breitbart, the news site, has basically lost about 30 percent of its traffic since that happened. Prager [University] down 32 percent, Daily Caller is down. Rare closed its doors. Some reports say IJR is on the brink of collapse because of it. Fox, by the way, is down too."

"Meanwhile purveyors of approved elite opinion," he added, "CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, they've been unaffected by this."

"What is this?" he asked. "Well it's an act of ideological warfare, and it's far more worrying than anything that Cambridge Analytica has done or is accused of doing."

Here's the segment from Tucker Carlson:

Carlson concluded the segment with an interview with Floyd Brown, the publisher of a right-wing website. "It's another form of social control," Carlson concluded.

A recent analysis showed that conservative sites were hit much worse from the algorithm change than other sites. Facebook's stock price, meanwhile, has been hit hard since they avowed that their data of millions of users was passed on to a third party, Cambridge Analytica.