Fourteen attorneys general are demanding that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg censor more posts and crack down on users who amplify content about COVID-19 that does not agree with the government’s narrative.
“While we appreciate the efforts your platforms have undertaken to address some elements of vaccine disinformation on your platforms, including connecting users with factual COVID-19 information, we believe Facebook itself is undermining these efforts by allowing such false or misleading statements to persist and spread,” their letter states.
The attorneys general hailing from Connecticut, California, Delaware, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Virginia not only asked Facebook’s founder to reveal its internal censorship methods for dealing with “vaccine disinformation,” but also asked the Big Tech mogul to commit to deplatforming certain users for promoting “anti-vaccine content” and “activists.”
Facebook already has a long history of censoring, downplaying, and even removing content it doesn’t agree with but the attorneys general cited the complaints of Facebook “whistleblower” Frances Haugen, a Democrat activist who helped nuke the New York Post’s Hunter Biden story last October, as the reason to demand more action from Zuckerberg.
“How is vaccine content being scored for removal? Have political or public relations considerations been factored into the scoring system?” the letter asks. “The Wall Street Journal reported that hundreds of thousands of anti-vaccine comments have been viewed every day. What is Facebook’s protocol to address false and misleading vaccine content that appears in the ‘comments’ section of posts?”
A new report from The Federalist shows that the Facebook CEO funneled $419.5 million with strings attached through The Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL) and The Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR) to select U.S. elections offices before the 2020 election. These “Zuck Bucks” were largely awarded based on partisanship to local and state offices, and demanded the promotion of universal mail-in voting, greater opportunities for “ballot curing,” and other vulnerable election tactics.
“Zuckerberg didn’t just help Democrats by censoring their political opponents. He directly funded liberal groups running partisan get-out-the-vote operations. In fact, he helped those groups infiltrate election offices in key swing states by doling out large grants to crucial districts,” Federalist Senior Editor Mollie Hemingway wrote in her new book “Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections.”
