Wall Street Journal Provides New Evidence of Facebook Politically-Driven Intervention in Content

"The Wall Street Journal just published a detailed story substantiating what many have suspected of Facebook, that it's been censoring right-wing content. Admittedly, this finding is in"dog bites man: terrain.

The Journal story relies on internal chats and focuses on Breitbart as an object of Facebook restrictions.

This degree of control over content makes it hard for Facebook to deny that it's a publisher, as opposed to a platform.

They said the company was allowing conservative sites to skirt the company's fact-checking rules, publish untrustworthy and offensive content and harm the tech giant's relationship with advertisers, according to records from internal Facebook message boards.

Regarding pro-Trump influencers Diamond and Silk, third-party fact-checkers rated as "False" a post on their page that said, "How the hell is allocating 25 million dollars in order to give a raised [sic] to house members, that don't give a damn about Americans, going to help stimulate America's economy?" When fact-checkers had rated that post "False," a Facebook staffer involved in the partner program argued there should be no punishment, noting the publisher "Has not hesitated going public about their concerns around alleged [anti-]conservative bias on Facebook."

The chat conversations the Journal reviewed show that inside the company, Facebook employees demanded that higher-ups explain the allegations.

The Journal also fails to provide some key backstory, that Diamond and Silk claimed that they had been censored by Facebook and had received a message stating their content and message were "Unsafe to the community." That got them a Congressional audience.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2021/10/wall-street-journal-provides-new-evidence-of-facebook-politically-driven-intervention-in-content.html