{"id":1020085,"date":"2021-11-16T15:14:16","date_gmt":"2021-11-16T20:14:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1020085"},"modified":"2021-11-16T15:14:20","modified_gmt":"2021-11-16T20:14:20","slug":"the-myth-of-fact-checking-how-facebook-created-the-worlds-largest-censorship-operation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/the-myth-of-fact-checking-how-facebook-created-the-worlds-largest-censorship-operation\/","title":{"rendered":"The Myth Of \u2018Fact-Checking\u2019: How Facebook Created The World\u2019s Largest Censorship Operation"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">24<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fthe-myth-of-fact-checking-how-facebook-created-the-worlds-largest-censorship-operation%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1020085&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>The 2020 presidential election resulted in something I never thought I\u2019d see \u2014 widespread, Soviet-style political censorship in American media. This censorship still dominates our discourse a year later, with no end in sight. There\u2019s a lot to be said about how we got to this place, but it\u2019s worth zeroing in on the two particular mechanisms for how this censorship is being enforced. The first is the rise of politicized media \u201cfact-checkers,\u201d and the second is Facebook. The fact these two entities have now joined forces means speaking freely online without an algorithm slapping a <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/Heminator\/status\/1449002154501488640\">warning label<\/a> on your opinion or <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/Heminator\/status\/1449483148794941443\">psychoanalyzing<\/a> your potential for extremism is becoming difficult.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>While I confess I didn\u2019t see this censorship regime gaining power so quickly, as a reporter in D.C. for over 20 years, I did see plenty of warning signs. One, in particular, was hard to ignore: In the summer of 2018, I was sitting in a staff meeting at the now-defunct magazine, The Weekly Standard, when an editor at the publication started yelling at me.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>At the time of the argument, The Weekly Standard was four months away from being shuttered, and though no one in the meeting knew we were facing the axe, a profound sense of unease had descended on the place. A hardline opposition to Trump wasn\u2019t universally shared by the magazine\u2019s staff, but for the two years following his election, top editors at the magazine regularly lambasted Trump and indulged in some regrettably erroneous Russia collusion reporting. This approach was not appreciated by our regular subscribers who had overwhelmingly voted for the president.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>And the argument that led to me getting yelled at was another Exhibit in prosecuting the case for how things at The Weekly Standard had gone wrong: We had gone from being an outlet that regularly published hard-hitting media criticism to enabling the worst media innovation in decades \u2013 so-called \u201cfact checking.\u201d&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>The staff meeting started, as usual, with some informal chatter about the big news of the day. In this case, Facebook had just announced it was banning <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cnet.com\/tech\/services-and-software\/facebook-bans-alex-jones-and-infowars-pages-over-violence-hate-speech\/\">conspiracy theorist Alex Jones<\/a> and his media outlet InfoWars from the platform for \u201cglorifying violence\u201d and \u201chate speech.\u201d None of us were fans of Jones. InfoWars content ranged from harmless tabloidy supposition about aliens to genuinely upsetting conspiracies about the Sandy Hook shooting. However, there was some consensus in the meeting that Facebook banning entire publications from the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The 2020 presidential election resulted in something I never thought I\u2019d see \u2014 widespread, Soviet-style political censorship in American media. This censorship still dominates our discourse a year later, with no end in sight. There\u2019s a lot to be said about how we got to this place, but it\u2019s worth zeroing in on the two particular mechanisms for how this censorship is being enforced. The first is the rise of politicized media \u201cfact-checkers,\u201d and the second is Facebook. The fact these two entities have now joined forces means speaking freely online without an algorithm slapping a warning label on your opinion or psychoanalyzing your potential for extremism is becoming difficult.\u00a0While I confess I didn\u2019t see this censorship regime gaining power so quickly, as a reporter in D.C. for over 20 years, I did see plenty of warning signs. One, in particular, was hard to ignore: In the summer of 2018, I was sitting in a staff meeting at the now-defunct magazine, The Weekly Standard, when an editor at the publication started yelling at me.\u00a0At the time of the argument, The Weekly Standard was four months away from being shuttered, and though no one in the meeting knew we were facing the axe, a profound sense of unease had descended on the place. A hardline opposition to Trump wasn\u2019t universally shared by the magazine\u2019s staff, but for the two years following his election, top editors at the magazine regularly lambasted Trump and indulged in some regrettably erroneous Russia collusion reporting. This approach was not appreciated by our regular subscribers who had overwhelmingly voted for the president.\u00a0And the argument that led to me getting yelled at was another Exhibit in prosecuting the case for how things at The Weekly Standard had gone wrong: We had gone from being an outlet that regularly published hard-hitting media criticism to enabling the worst media innovation in decades \u2013 so-called \u201cfact checking.\u201d\u00a0The staff meeting started, as usual, with some informal chatter about the big news of the day. In this case, Facebook had just announced it was banning conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his media outlet InfoWars from the platform for \u201cglorifying violence\u201d and \u201chate speech.\u201d None of us were fans of Jones. InfoWars content ranged from harmless tabloidy supposition about aliens to genuinely upsetting conspiracies about the Sandy Hook shooting. However, there was some consensus in the meeting that Facebook banning entire publications from the platform was a bad omen for free speech. And it didn\u2019t make anyone feel better that Facebook\u2019s decision to ban Jones came shortly after a pressure campaign launched by CNN, a network that, ironically enough, had spent the last few years indulging in nonstop Trump-Russia reporting that wasn\u2019t any less conspiratorial than many of Jones\u2019 rantings.\u00a0That\u2019s when The Weekly Standard\u2019s on-staff fact-checker spoke up and all hell broke loose.\u00a0Now, it helps to understand the fact checker we employed at The Weekly Standard had his salary paid for by Facebook. Less than a year before, editors above my paygrade decided we were going to be one of a handful of media outlets that agreed to partner with Facebook for the social media giant\u2019s \u201cfact checking\u201d program. In exchange for a few crumbs from a company with a $1 trillion market cap, we would write \u201cfact checks\u201d taking politicians and pundits to task for spreading \u201cdisinformation.\u201d Facebook would then use those write-ups to make content moderation decisions. In addition to writing fact check columns for our website, the Facebook-funded fact-checker would also be serving as a traditional in-house fact checker, going over magazine articles pre-publication to root out errors. The editors saw this as a win-win.I was never consulted by the editors about this decision to partner with Facebook for several obvious reasons. In 2016, I wrote a piece for the magazine\u2019s website bluntly calling Facebook\u2019s plan to partner with outside media organizations to fact check content on the platform \u201ca terrible Idea.\u201d And years before that in 2011, I had written a cover story for the magazine headlined, \u201cLies, Damned Lies, and \u2018Fact-Checking.\u2019\u201d It was the first major \u2013 and deeply critical \u2013 examination of media \u201cfact checking\u201d organizations such as PolitiFact and The Washington Post Fact Checker.\u00a0The article made a splash and I\u2019d spent years afterward writing tens of thousands of words inveighing against the dishonest tactics of corporate media fact checkers who were now working for Facebook. I thought I\u2019d done a pretty good job over the years demonstrating media fact checkers were demonstrably biased, employing dishonest contextual arguments to disproportionately claim with pseudo-scientific objectivity that the rhetoric employed by anyone right-of-center was a \u201cpants on fire\u201d lie or worthy of \u201cfour Pinocchios.\u201d\u00a0The actual track record of media fact checker malpractice and dishonesty wasn\u2019t up for debate. Long before Trump, there were critical university studies showing that fact checkers accuse Republicans of lying three times as often as Democrats. Further, fact checkers\u2019 reticence to fact check Democrats was pretty clearly tied to helping Democrats win elections. PolitiFact rated Obama\u2019s famously dishonest 2012 campaign promise about the Obamacare law \u2014 \u201cif you like your health insurance, you can keep your health insurance \u2014 as \u201ctrue\u201d six different times. When the law phased in after Obama had lied to secure his reelection, millions of Americans were suddenly kicked off their health insurance plans as a result. PolitiFact then disingenuously made it \u201clie of the year\u201d in 2013, one year after telling the truth about the law might have made a difference in the election.\u00a0Once upon a time, editors at the magazine would have agreed with me about how corrupt it was that Facebook was now paying PolitiFact to produce these partisan hatchet jobs, but now we had taken Facebook\u2019s money and hired our own \u201cfact checker.\u201d The editors presumably thought as a conservative publication, we would bring some balance to the endeavor. I felt like they should have known better.\u00a0As it happens, the guy they hired as our fact checker was a diligent, hard working, and intelligent journalist in a relatively thankless job. But he was also in his early 20s, comparatively inexperienced, and had written at least one fact check column where I\u2019d disagreed with his conclusions \u2014 and conservative blogs had a field day blasting The Weekly Standard for what he had written.\u00a0But to his credit, he seemed to know his limits, and this prompted him to speak up in our staff meeting. Even before the Alex Jones ban, he said he was growing concerned about his job because of the growing power of Facebook. He explained that whenever he did one of his fact checking columns, part of his gig involved going into a special portal in Facebook\u2019s backend created for its fact checking mercenaries, where he entered details about his fact check. When he entered a claim of \u201cfalse,\u201d he was asked to enter the URL of the story where he found the claim \u2013 at which point Facebook, according to their own press releases, would then kill 80 percent of the global internet traffic to that story. Our fact checker explained this was making him uncomfortable. Some of these fact checks were complicated, and he felt his judgment wasn\u2019t absolute.\u00a0It was a record scratch moment in the staff meeting. After a beat, I spoke up and said something to the effect of \u201cyou mean to tell me, that a single journalist has the power to render judgment to nearly wipe a news story off of the internet?\u201d Where our publication had once taken pride in challenging the dishonesty and bias of the corporate media, it dawned on me \u2014 and more than a few others in the room \u2014 that whatever influence our failing publication had was now being leveraged to act as part of a terrifyingly effective censorship regime controlled by a hated social media company run by one of the world\u2019s richest men.\u00a0And that\u2019s when the editor started yelling. I don\u2019t harbor any resentment over his brief burst of anger. It was a stressful time and we were all on the verge of losing our jobs. I don\u2019t recall much of what he said in the moment, except that to my astonishment, he said Facebook needed to ban even more people.\u00a0The origins of Facebook\u2019s fact checking program are not a mystery: Trump won in 2016.\u00a0Naturally, Russian election interference, a narrative served up on a platter by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic party to explain their 2016 loss, was swallowed whole by the FBI, and regurgitated by the media.\u00a0However, it was the uproar over Facebook\u2019s alleged role in the 2020 election that really sowed the seeds of the media\u2019s complete implosion. This was quite the fall from grace. In 2012 the Obama campaign maximally exploited Facebook\u2019s data to reach out to voters, and this was greeted with a chorus of hosannas from the press, eager to praise this technologically savvy electioneering. Carol Davidsen, the analytics director on Obama\u2019s campaign, later admitted the campaign had access to Facebook\u2019s data and that Facebook \u201callowed us to do things they wouldn\u2019t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side.\u201dBut where Facebook was eager to be credited for Obama\u2019s victory, almost immediately after Trump\u2019s election the knives were out internally. \u201cFacebook employees have formed an unofficial task force to question the role their company played in promoting fake news in the lead-up to Donald Trump\u2019s victory in the US election last week,\u201d reported BuzzFeed in November of 2016. The employees were operating in defiance of CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who said the idea that Facebook had unfairly tilted the election in Trump\u2019s favor was \u201ccrazy.\u201d And by all accounts the suggestion Facebook as a company wasn\u2019t in the tank for Democrats was, in fact, crazy. Earlier in 2016, former Facebook workers told Gizmodo employees at the social network were actively suppressing Conservative news so that it didn\u2019t trend on the site. Trump had run a savvy digital campaign, for sure, but there was no way they were given the access to the platform the Obama campaign had been given.\u00a0The media and Democratic politicians continued to pounce on post-election reports about trivial amounts of Russian propaganda appearing on Facebook and other social networks. It didn\u2019t matter these claims were usually overstated and fueled irresponsible speculation that Trump\u2019s election was illegitimate. Zuckerberg was facing mounting public pressure to do something, anything to convince liberal America it was taking the problem of disinformation at Facebook seriously.\u00a0Still, the response to growing complaints about \u201cfake news\u201d on Facebook went well beyond kicking off a few foreign troll farms. How could Facebook institute the kind of sweeping censorship that would be necessary to placate their angry critics and dissenting employees?\u00a0Thanks to the infamous section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, Facebook was spared legal liability for any harmful content that appeared on its site on the understanding it was a neutral platform for third-party content. The belief that Facebook and other social media sites weren\u2019t exercising the same kind of sweeping editorial judgments that made traditional publishers subject to libel laws was always a bit of a farce, but Facebook didn\u2019t want additional legal exposure or scrutiny that would come with telling political organizations and media outlets what they could and could not say on a website that, fairly or not, presented itself as public forum. Facebook needed to bring outside media organizations in to help them in their quest to censor the news.\u00a0Once upon a time, the media would have seen Facebook\u2019s decision to bring them in as outside censors as an indecent proposal \u2013 but by 2016, media organizations were thoroughly compromised. The internet had largely killed off direct subscription business models, so they were all dependent on social media platforms such as Facebook for revenue. And if the American media once had a classically liberal reverence for the First Amendment that enabled their business, America\u2019s newsrooms were now so politicized they were happy to choose the form of their destructor if it meant keeping Republicans out of power. It took no time at all to get the media on board with Facebook\u2019s grand censorship plans.In December of 2016, Facebook announced it was partnering with media fact checkers \u201cto combat and bury \u2018fake news\u2019,\u201d according to Business insider. That this program was launched just two months after Trump won should make the motivation of the program abundantly clear. The media and big tech oligarchs had been unable to play a decisive role in the 2016 election. Now they were teaming up to exert even more control over what information voters would be allowed to see and hear. And sure enough, under Trump the normalization of censorship occurred much the same way that Ernest Hemingway described how bankruptcy happens \u2013 slowly then all at once.\u00a0After taking some time to ramp up, the Facebook fact checking partnership started to flex its muscles. In March of 2018, after being flagged by Facebook fact checking partner Snopes, Facebook threatened to deplatform the popular Christian satire site The Babylon Bee. The offending article fact checked by Snopes was \u201cCNN Purchases Industrial-Sized Washing Machine To Spin The News Before Publication.\u201d The Babylon Bee would be repeatedly harassed by Facebook as a result of Snopes doing dozens of fact checks on their humor pieces over the next two years. The inevitable result was, according to the Bee, Facebook began dramatically throttling traffic to the site, even though it has over one million followers on Facebook.\u00a0And while CNN, unlike Snopes, was not an official Facebook fact checking partner, their successful pressure campaign to get Alex Jones removed from the platform further put everyone on notice. At one point in 2019, Facebook blocked all links from Zero Hedge, a popular site known for its edgy takes on political and financial news. Dozens of smaller sites that published political content soon found themselves placed in Facebook purgatory, and without staying in the good graces of a website that has nearly 3 billion monthly users, their influence and online ad revenue could be all but eradicated. It was becoming clear that Facebook\u2019s fact checking program was being used to suppress internet media upstarts which threatened the credibility of the legacy news outlets by offering a different point of view than the left-leaning corporate media.\u00a0By the time 2020 rolled around with a global pandemic, nationwide riots, and a presidential election, the desire of the media to police the discourse reached new heights.Starting in early 2020, Facebook banned not just a few dodgy articles, but almost all discussion that the communist Chinese government was lying about the origins of the COVID-19 outbreak. Despite the fact the Wuhan Institute of Virology was doing research on coronaviruses a few miles from the source of the outbreak, pointing out these basic facts was dismissed as a racist conspiracy theory by Facebook\u2019s fact checking partners and the media broadly.\u00a0This was always a leading possibility for the origin of the virus, but acknowledging the dishonesty of China\u2019s communist government would reinforce Trump\u2019s longstanding warnings about the dangers the country posed. Once Trump was out of the White House, it was announced publicly America\u2019s intel agencies were relaunching the investigation into the lab leak. Facebook turned on a dime and admitted the evidence was sufficient to allow for the possibility of discussing the lab leak hypothesis. Facebook\u2019s fact checking partner, PolitiFact, which had sanctimoniously made \u201ccoronavirus disinformation\u201d its lie of the year in 2020, ended up retracting it\u2019s harsh \u201cpants on fire\u201d fact-check of the \u201cdebunked conspiracy theory\u201d COVID-19 may have come from a lab.There was a hint of introspection when the truth came out, but it soon passed. \u201cI think a lot of people have egg on their face,\u201d said ABC News\u2019s Jonathan Karl in May 2021. \u201cThis was an idea that was first put forward by Mike Pompeo, secretary of state, Donald Trump. And look, some things may be true even if Donald Trump said them.\u201dEven now Facebook still maintains an exhaustive policy regarding what you can and can\u2019t say online regarding the COVID-19 pandemic. As part of that policy, Facebook maintains that they will \u201cremove misinformation when public health authorities conclude that the information is false.\u201d That\u2019s right \u2013 even now you\u2019re not allowed to question the authorities on Facebook, which is after all, the entire point of exercising free speech rights. Facebook maintains this policy even after emails revealed U.S. health officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, apparently knew all along the lab leak hypothesis was a likely explanation for the outbreak, and at the same time they appeared to be hiding their own involvement in the research at Wuhan Institute of Virology.\u00a0The implementation of Facebook\u2019s aggressive new policies for censoring information also served as a template for other social media companies. Censorship would be tolerated provided that a \u201cfact check\u201d was conducted to determine the information was false. And so in May of 2020, Trump sent out two tweets that included the contention that there \u201cThere is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent.\u201dPressure had long been building for Twitter to censor Trump, and now for the first time in the middle of an election year, the company added to both tweets an exclamation point followed by a link to \u201cGet the facts about mail-in ballots.\u201d That link led to a short statement from Twitter that \u201cTrump makes unsubstantiated claim that mail-in ballots will lead to voter fraud,\u201d with a short summary of \u201cfacts\u201d about mail-in voting.\u00a0\u00a0But Twitter\u2019s contention this is unsubstantiated just wasn\u2019t true. For one thing, the election hadn\u2019t happened yet, and they were fact checking conjecture. It is commonly acknowledged that mail-in ballots were more susceptible to fraud than voting in person. In 2008, the CalTech\/MIT Voting Technology Project recommended states \u201crestrict or abolish on-demand absentee voting in favor of in-person early voting,\u201d due to fraud concerns. A 2005 election reform commission chaired by former president Jimmy Carter also warned that mail-in ballots were the largest source of potential voter fraud. Tens of millions more mail-in votes were expected in 2020 because of the pandemic, without a corresponding increase in security measures.\u00a0As the censoring of Trump was being cheered on, the media quite literally chose not to fact check the most damaging allegations against Joe Biden. After years of speculating about Trump\u2019s collusion with Russia, it was revealed in September of 2020 that a firm founded by Hunter Biden received a $3.5 million wire transfer from the wife of the former mayor of Moscow for a vague \u201cconsultancy agreement.\u201d\u00a0The New York Times, Washington Post, MSNBC, CNN, and\u00a0most media outlets\u00a0didn\u2019t cover the wire-transfer story at all.\u00a0When Joe Biden was finally directly asked about the story by Trump in the first presidential debate, Biden said the story was \u201cTotally discredited. Totally discredited.\u201d Naturally, PolitiFact declined to issue a ruling on the veracity of the claim even though it was backed up by Treasury department documents reported in an official report issued by the U.S. Senate. Had they ruled the accusation true, that meant the Biden campaign\u2019s dishonest denials would have been flagged as fake news on Facebook, which surely would have damaged his campaign.\u00a0The fact checking farce reached its apotheosis in October of 2020 when the New York Post obtained damning information from Hunter Biden\u2019s laptop detailing Biden family corruption. Twitter immediately blocked the link to the New York Post story, prohibiting it from being shared by anyone. And Facebook immediately announced they weren\u2019t going to bother with the charade of waiting to fact check the story before censoring it. \u201cWhile I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want to be clear that this story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook\u2019s third-party fact checking partners,\u201d wrote Facebook\u2019s Policy Communications Director Andy Stone. \u201cIn the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform.\u201d\u00a0It bears mentioning that Stone formerly worked for California Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Usually, the Democratic party had to indirectly feed its agenda to a sympathetic press, but here we had the remarkable spectacle of the partisan snake eating its own tail: A Democratic political operative, employed by the largest social network in the world, was announcing the decision to bypass Facebook\u2019s allegedly impartial fact checking process, and unilaterally censoring a story damaging to a Democratic presidential candidate in the middle of a close election.\u00a0Was the decision to bury such a damaging story about corruption involving the man who\u2019s now President of the United States decisive in an election that was essentially decided by 40,000 votes out of 159 million cast? Well, journalists seemed to think so.\u00a0\u201cAccording to Biden campaign metrics, online chatter about the Hunter Biden story during the election\u2019s last week was greater than it was around Hillary\u2019s emails during last month of \u201816,\u201d observed Politico editor Sam Stein shortly after the election. \u201cThe difference: it never spilled over into mainstream outlets.\u201dA month after the election, Hunter Biden publicly announced he was under investigation for corruption. Since then, a raft of information has emerged to confirm the information the Post obtained from Hunter\u2019s laptop was genuine. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey told Congress earlier this year it was a \u201cmistake\u201d to ban the New York Post story.\u00a0This past June, left-wing Journalist and free speech crusader Glenn Greenwald asked Andy Stone if there was \u201cany news on the fact-checking process you claimed Facebook was undertaking on the Hunter Biden documents in the weeks leading up to the election when \u2013 as a life-long Dem operative \u2013 you announced for FB that the reporting on this story would be algorithmically suppressed?\u201d\u00a0Stone and Facebook have yet to answer the question.\u00a0What happened after the 2020 election should obviously be concerning to anyone who cares about the truth in public debates. Even with dubious conspiracies about the election being stolen circulating widely, an irresponsibly politicized media establishment lacked the credibility to rebut them effectively. Even for the Trump voters who didn\u2019t believe the election was stolen, it was hard to argue that it was a \u201cfair election\u201d given the double standards and stranglehold on information that had been applied in the years leading up to and through the 2020 election. Voters are clearly angry about all this manipulation of the facts.\u00a0Apple and Amazon\u2019s immediate deplatforming of the Trump friendly social network Parler following the January 6 Capitol riot was also unprecedented \u2013 and revealing. Subsequent government charging documents would reveal that Parler played almost no role in facilitating the organizers of the January 6 riot. Most of their coordination was done on, yes, Facebook. Yet, the response from these other big tech corporations was to wipe one of Facebook\u2019s competitors off of the internet.\u00a0For their part, Facebook and Twitter immediately banned Trump from using their platforms and he has not been allowed back. Outside of the discourse governed by America\u2019s liberal elites, this has been alarming. Even German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who made little attempt to disguise her contempt for Trump, expressed concern about tech overlords banning elected leaders.\u00a0Similarly, the establishment media is trying to strangle any form of media that allows news consumers the chance to opt-out of the legacy media ecosystem that has increasingly gone all-in on outright censorship of anything that exists outside liberal political narratives. Earlier this year, Glenn Greenwald chronicled how journalists were \u201cdemanding Substack censor its writers.\u201d You can probably guess why they\u2019re not fond of a popular newsletter service that enables writers to send their thoughts directly to readers without the typical corporate advertising pressures or liberal editorial imperatives imposed on reporters at big media outlets: It makes it harder for the press to control our elections.\u00a0Similarly, The Poynter Institute \u2013 PolitiFact\u2019s parent organization \u2013 expressed concern about Clubhouse, the social media app that allows people to have actual voice conversations with each other. Poynter ran an entire column fretting that \u201clive audio and no recording might complicate the work of fact-checkers on this new platform.\u201d Poynter is apparently operating under the assumption that the ability of private citizens to have conversations with each other over the phone without being spied on by journalists should be an aberration, rather than the norm.\u00a0\u00a0Most recently, in September Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee, has emerged as a \u201cwhistleblower\u201d providing damning documents purporting to detail how the company harmfully manipulates children. Haugen has received a hefty amount of attention from 60 Minutes and other high profile media outlets, and this media attention culminated in a congressional hearing where Democratic senator Amy Klobuchar said she hoped Haugen\u2019s testimony will be the \u201ccatalyst for action.\u201d Whatever concerns you have about social media\u2019s effect on children, the fact Haugen\u2019s anti-Facebook campaign is being orchestrated by top Democratic party operatives endorsed by Democratic politicians is revealing.\u00a0Speculation or not, it\u2019s perfectly rational to assume political pressure from Democrats on Facebook is ultimately about making sure that Facebook continues to control information in ways that benefit them politically.\u00a0Three years ago when I was getting yelled at for questioning Facebook\u2019s ability to fairly adjudicate political disputes, I don\u2019t think anyone in the room anticipated what the next few years would bring. From the media and big tech censoring the President of the United States, to the broad suppression of legitimate reporting on political scandals and the wiping of entire sites off of the internet. And yet, I have seen very little in the way of self-awareness from journalists such that they would stop enabling this dramatic erosion of free speech.\u00a0Suffice to say, I have since parted ways politically and professionally with the editor who yelled at me that day in defense of Facebook. Since then, he\u2019s very publicly and unironically argued in favor of \u201cMOAR Censorship!\u201d on multiple occasions.\u00a0And after we all lost our jobs, The Weekly Standard\u2019s former fact-checker, the one who dared to express concern about Facebook becoming an engine of global censorship, got a job as a fact checker for CNN \u2013 the very news outlet that instigated Facebook\u2019s Alex Jones ban.\u00a0The editor-in-chief of The Weekly Standard who signed off on our Facebook partnership has since gone on to start a new publication called The Dispatch that still participates in Facebook\u2019s fact checking program. Last year, just before the election, a fact check from The Dispatch got a pro-life group\u2019s ads banned from Facebook. Their fact check said it was unfair to claim Joe Biden supports late-term abortion. The Dispatch would later admit their fact check was \u201cpublished in error.\u201d\u00a0Facebook\u2019s third-party \u201cfact checking\u201d program has also grown extensively since then. Facebook now funds more than 80 different fact checkers and has spent over $84 million on the program to date. \u201cWe know this program is working and people find value in the warning screens we apply to content after a fact-checking partner has rated it,\u201d says Facebook\u2019s website on touting their fact checking program. \u201cWe surveyed people who had seen these warning screens on-platform and found that 74% of people thought they saw the right amount or were open to seeing more false information labels, with 63% of people thinking they were applied fairly.\u201dIn sum, the evidence that people are happy with Facebook\u2019s censorship program is that Facebook says they are. Even if Facebook touting its own internal surveys was credible, they\u2019re still admitting 37 percent of Facebook users don\u2019t think their misinformation warnings are applied fairly. That\u2019s a huge number, and Facebook\u2019s own surveys should be telling them their misinformation policies are creating distrust among a very large segment of the population. But bizarrely, Facebook is touting this as if it\u2019s reassuring. To quote one of the more incisive critiques of modern journalism, \u201cThey\u2019ve done studies, you know. Sixty percent of the time, it works every time.\u201dFacebook\u2019s indefensible justifications can\u2019t just bulldoze past the reality Americans now face. In just a few years, we went from concerns about disinformation that were vague and hysterical in equal measure, to allowing one of the world\u2019s largest corporations wide latitude to capriciously censor the news with the goal of influencing elections on behalf of Democrats. The press, the one group that is supposed to warn us about the dangers of this kind of fascist arrangement, is totally fine with submitting to and enabling this unprecedented exercise of power. And no, that\u2019s not hyperbole \u2013 despite all the howling about \u201cDrumpf,\u201d the actual definition of fascism put forth by Mussolini himself is the merging of corporate and state power, typically achieved by alliance with a political party. It seems to accurately describe the situation.\u00a0Given the lines that have already been crossed, history doesn\u2019t suggest a lot of examples of people restoring a culture of free speech once it\u2019s been taken from them. The good news is that the big tech-corporate media censorship regime is still fairly new, and after the last several years, many more authoritative surveys show voters are increasingly distrustful of both big tech and the media, even if they don\u2019t fully understand exactly how this corrupt alliance is controlling what news they see and hear.\u00a0But if you do understand what\u2019s happening, the censorship that\u2019s been forced on us really is dire \u2013 and it\u2019s time we started yelling about it.\u00a0Mark Hemingway is a Senior Writer at RealClearInvestigations, reporting on\u00a0the key institutions shaping public life, from lobbying groups to federal agencies to elections. His writing has appeared in USA Today, Wall Street Journal, MTV.com, and The Weekly Standard.The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author\u2019s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":274,"featured_media":2315279,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1020085","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1020085","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/274"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1020085"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1020085\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2315279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1020085"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1020085"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1020085"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}