Facebook Comes Clean On Prior Censorship

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Four years ago – while the vast majority of U.S. media outlets were parroting deep state narratives and censoring anyone who dared to challenge them – our news outlet was exposing the truth. We were also calling out the social media platforms that were complicit in suppressing it.

“We saw state-sponsored censorship run rampant during the Covid-19 pandemic – and ahead of the 2020 U.S. presidential election,” I noted at the time.

A lot has happened since then…

First, the galling corruption our media outlet – and so many others – reported on involving then-candidate Joe Biden has been proven true (see here and here). Meanwhile, one of the most infamous disinformation campaigns leveled against his rival, Donald Trump, has been debunked as a deep state hoax.

And the government-directed censorship underpinning and driving all of this manipulation? That’s been exposed, too…

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RELATED | BIDEN-HARRIS ENJOINED FROM FURTHER CENSORSHIP

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As if any additional evidence were necessary to prove our government conspired with these Big Tech platforms to censor the truth – and to censor us – Meta chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg published a stunning mea culpa earlier this week.

In a letter to U.S. House judiciary committee chairman Jim Jordan dated Monday (August 26, 2024), Zuckerberg made several key admissions about his company’s starring role in the pre-2020 election censorship campaign.

Chief among them? The real story about the mass censorship of a story detailing Biden’s corruption published by The New York Post in October 2020.

“The FBI warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Bursima in the lead up to the 2020 election,” Zuckerberg wrote. “That fall, when we saw a New York Post story reporting on corruption allegations involving then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s family, we sent that story to fact-checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting for a reply.”

Twitter – then fully under the control of the far left – obviously did far worse than Facebook in its handling of these reports.

The Biden laptop story was not Russian disinformation. It was 100 percent accurate – which Zuckerberg belatedly admitted.

“It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story,” he wrote. “We’ve changed our policies and processes to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

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Mark Zuckerberg just admitted three things:

1. Biden-Harris Admin "pressured" Facebook to censor Americans.

2. Facebook censored Americans.

3. Facebook throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story.

Big win for free speech. pic.twitter.com/ALlbZd9l6K

— House Judiciary GOP ?????? (@JudiciaryGOP) August 26, 2024

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Zuckerberg’s letter reiterated the administration of Biden and Kamala Harris “repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor Covid-19 content,” something a federal judge had to step in and enjoin them from doing last summer.

“I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,” Zuckerberg wrote in his letter to Jordan. “I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today.”

Unsurprisingly, the Biden/Harris administration defended its wholesale attempt to suppress free speech.

“Our position has been clear and consistent: We believe tech companies and other private actors should take into account the effects their actions have on the American people, while making independent choices about the information they present,” a statement from the White House noted.

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Jordan’s committee hailed the letter as a “big win for free speech.” The judiciary committee also praised Zuckerberg for keeping his multi-billion dollar fortune out of the 2024 election cycle – referring to it as a “huge win for election integrity.”

Truthfully, a “big win” for free speech would’ve been to never allow such an all-encompassing censorship campaign to take root in our country in the first place. As U.S. district judge Terry A. Doughty noted last summer in his ruling against the Biden administration, this was “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”

As we approach another pivotal pre-election period, we would encourage everyone in our audience – no matter their partisan or ideological leanings – to be vigilant against censorship. We would also encourage everyone in our audience to think critically about the information they consume (including the information they consume from our outlet).

A robust marketplace of ideas requires free, engaged thinkers every bit as much as it requires honest brokers of information…

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR …

Will Folks is the owner and founding editor of FITSNews. Prior to founding his own news outlet, he served as press secretary to the governor of South Carolina, bass guitarist in an alternative rock band and bouncer at a Columbia, S.C. dive bar. He lives in the Midlands region of the state with his wife and eight children.

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