https://archive.is/nnY8s
Radical
liberal opinion site ThinkProgress has found itself censored by
Facebook’s ‘fact checkers,’ just weeks after calling on the social
network to censor right-wing polemicist Alex Jones.
A
ThinkProgress article on Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh,
published Sunday, was deemed ‘fake news’ by Facebook’s fact checkers.
The article itself claimed that Kavanaugh would overturn Roe v Wade, the
landmark 1973 case guaranteeing Americans the constitutional right to
an abortion, based on snippets of Kavanaugh’s legal rulings and
speeches.
The
‘fact checkers’ – in this case the conservative-leaning Weekly
Standard – evaluated ThinkProgress’ claims and found them to be false.
Sure, Kavanaugh made some statements that hinted at his opposition to
Roe v Wade, but he never outright said he’d “kill it,” as the article
claims .
Once
an article has been deemed false by Facebook, its traffic is restricted
and pages that share the offending article will see their traffic and
ability to advertise removed. This fake-news
purge
is part of Facebook’s publicly stated plan to clamp down on election
interference and exercise tighter control over what users see on their
news feeds.
To
do this, Facebook has teamed up with third-party ‘fact checkers,’ which
include the Associated Press, AFP, and the Weekly Standard. The
Standard’s inclusion on the list is widely seen as a cursory nod to the
political right, as the news organizations Facebook has previously
consulted
to decide how to rank news stories mostly lean left-of-center.
Bitter
that its article was nixed by a fact-checker from the right,
ThinkProgress slammed the Weekly Standard for picking on a left-wing
site, and blasted Facebook for
“pandering
to the right”
by consulting such an outlet.
Fate is not without a sense of irony. Two months before they were censored, ThinkProgress
lashed out
at Facebook for giving a platform to controversial conspiracy theorist
Alex Jones. How, the article argued, could Facebook claim to fight fake
news, yet allow Jones a platform to spread “baseless conspiracy theories?”
Jones’
reckoning came a month later, when he was swiftly excommunicated from
Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, and a host of other internet platforms.
ThinkProgress did not lash out at the censors who made the decision to
‘de-platform’ Jones – far from it. The outlet has previously called for
the
barring of RT, and has
cheered
Facebook’s clampdown on Russian and Iranian accounts that spread misinformation to “gullible populations”
in the West.
Facebook
and other Silicon Valley tech giants have been repeatedly accused of
bias by the American right. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was grilled by
Republican lawmakers for allegedly censoring conservative content when
he appeared before Congress earlier this year, and President Trump spoke
out against the
“discrimination”
last month, promising that his administration “won’t let that happen.”
However,
a slew of recent examples show that the left shouldn’t cheer for the
silencing of right-wing voices, lest they be next in the firing line.
TeleSur, a news network funded in part by the Venezuelan government, saw
its Facebook page abruptly removed last month, with the network
claiming that
“no specific reason”
was given for the removal aside from the claim that TeleSUR might have violated one of the platform’s terms of use.
The
same thing happened to Venezuelanalysis, another leftist news and
opinion site focusing on the socialist country, as well as a smattering
of other anti-war, anti-imperialist, and pro-Palestine
pages.
Above
the partisan bickering, some see Facebook’s fact-checking and fake-news
flagging as part of a wider crackdown on dissident narratives, whether
they come from the left or the right.
“We’ve been had, and we’re being conned again,”
journalist Abby Martin said, after her anti-imperialist show ‘The Empire Files temporarily shut down
last month. “The
establishment and the whole Russiagate narrative is basically
convincing people that our enemies are not who rules over us: The empire
is not the enemy; those we see, activists, left-wingers, those are the
real enemies.”
Facebook
has some powerful allies in its fight against the enemies of the
empire. It recently partnered up with the Digital Forensic Lab, a
subsidiary of the Atlantic Council, as part of its ongoing mission to
police news and views on its platform. In a
blog
post announcing the partnership, the DFL said that it would strive to “expose and explain falsehood online,”
and weed out the West’s favorite bogeymen – ‘Russian bots.’
The
Atlantic Council is a neo-liberal think tank set up in 1961 to promote
Western ideology around the world. While it is unclear whether
Facebook’s partnership with the Atlantic Council is directly responsible
for its purge of dissident narratives, the purge is taking place. Those
like ThinkProgress who applaud censoring and banning of conservatives
should not be surprised when one day they find themselves censored in
return.
No comments:
Post a Comment