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Facebook has temporarily banned the pro-Trump super PAC known as the Committee to Defend the President from purchasing ads on its platform until Nov. 1st, at the earliest.
“As a result of the Committee to Defend the President’s repeated sharing of content determined by third-party fact-checkers to be false, they will not be permitted to advertise for a period of time on our platform,” FB spokesperson Andy Stone reportedly said in a statement to the media on Thursday.
#BREAK Facebook is going to ban the pro-Trump super PAC The Committee to Defend the President from advertising on its platform for “repeated sharing of content determined by third-party fact-checkers to be false…”
— Donie O’Sullivan (@donie) August 6, 2020
Facebook didn’t say how long the ban would be for.
Facebook allows politicians to target its users with lies in political ads, but PACs and other political groups are subject to fact-checking.
— Donie O’Sullivan (@donie) August 6, 2020
According to Fox Business Network, the ban will start on Aug. 10th and continue until two days before the pivotal 2020 presidential election.
In his statement to the media, Stone provided no examples of the super PAC sharing so-called misinformation.
He reportedly simply pointed to company policies that allow for “taking action against repeat offenders: Pages and websites that repeatedly share false news will have some restrictions, including having their distribution reduced. They may also have their ability to monetize and advertise removed, and their ability to register as a news Page removed.”
Speaking to FBN, Committee to Defend The President chairman Ted Harvey claimed the ban is a politically motivated effort “to restrict free speech and attack those who dare to support President Trump.”
“When their liberal, Trump-hating ‘fact-checkers’ complained about the Committee’s first ad for correctly calling out Joe Biden, we changed it. When those same ‘fact-checkers’ didn’t bother to check the facts or even watch our second ad, they still banned us,” he said.
“The Committee will not be silenced by ‘woke’ Silicon Valley elites, as we expose the real Joe Biden. We have reallocated our entire Facebook budget to other online platforms, so Americans can see the whole truth—not just Facebook’s truth.”
While it’s not clear which specific ad he’d referenced, the committee has run several ads about Biden, including this one:
And this one:
FB’s announcement came on the same day that BuzzFeed ran a so-called “scoop” about disgruntled Facebook employees who have alleged that the social media network is giving “preferential treatment” to conservative pages.
“[A] senior engineer collected internal evidence that showed Facebook was giving preferential treatment to prominent conservative accounts to help them remove fact-checks from their content,” the outlet reported without actually detailing the “evidence.”
“[S]ome of Facebook’s own employees gathered evidence they say shows Breitbart — along with other right-wing outlets and figures including Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, Trump supporters Diamond and Silk, and conservative video production nonprofit Prager University — has received special treatment that helped it avoid running afoul of company policy. They see it as part of a pattern of preferential treatment for right-wing publishers and pages, many of which have alleged that the social network is biased against conservatives.”
In tweets posted late Thursday and early Friday, Grabien Media founder and editor Tom Elliott disputed the allegations and also slammed CNN senior media reporter Oliver Darcy for his eager willingness to be a cheerleader for the unconfirmed claims.
Look:
This article fails to cite a single example of a conservative news outlet receiving preferential treatment after publishing something false. https://t.co/btOpg5peqW
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) August 6, 2020
This is the closest thing they offer to a specific example. A random post from Diamond & Silk that Buzzfeed apparently believes should be rated “false” and not “partly false” — despite it not even being a news article! pic.twitter.com/lWbTrmY6Xv
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) August 6, 2020
My history with Facebook is precisely the opposite. Their Media Police require you to bend the truth in order to avoid having posts be flagged as “false” https://t.co/zyDkeKmqx2 https://t.co/8bWecXorVJ
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) August 6, 2020
CNN’s @oliverdarcy calls this Buzzfeed article “scoopy” despite it simply regurgitating complaints from a disgruntled former employee without citing a single example that backs up its headline pic.twitter.com/r5ilbIstvj
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) August 7, 2020
These events come as both congressional Democrats and their media allies have ratcheted up their attacks on Facebook in the hopes of forcing the social media network to silence information that they deem to be so-called “misinformation.”
“Twenty state attorneys general are calling for Facebook to take a series of steps to more proactively combat disinformation and hate speech, becoming the latest group to demand the tech giant take firmer action against incendiary content on its platform,” The Hill reported Wednesday.
“The state officials on Wednesday sent a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg stating that the company has “fallen short” on a range of issues, including rooting out online harassment, discrimination and misinformation.”
But missing from their attacks was any mention of the reality that their own media allies are themselves responsible for the dissemination of vast quantities of misinformation — from false allegations of Russian collusion to bizarre conspiracy theories and sometimes even pure, unadulterated political propaganda — and unbridled hate.
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