Tag: Facebook

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Accountability ideological culture social media

Stossel Sues Facebook

John Stossel, Facebook, slander, law

“After 40+ years of reporting,” offers John Stossel on his Facebook page, “I now understand the importance of limited government.”

“I just sued Facebook,” Stossel posted yesterday. “I didn’t want to sue. I hate lawsuits. I tried for a year to reach someone at Facebook to fix things, but Facebook wouldn’t.”

What needs fixing?

Facebook’s fact-checkers dinged him with a “partly false”/“factual inaccuracies” label for his StosselTV video “Are We Doomed?” — without challenging any specific fact. And regarding another video, “Government Fueled Fires,” Todd Spangler of Variety quotes the case, which accuses Facebook of “falsely attributed to Stossel a claim he never made, and on that basis flagged the content as ‘misleading’ and ‘missing context,’ so that would-be viewers would be routed to the false attribution statement.”

Stephen Green writes in support of Stossel’s $2 million lawsuit, demurring only to add that there’s only one little problem: “If there’s a way through the courts to change Facebook’s bad behavior, it’s going to take a judgment with a lot more zeroes on the end.”

The lawsuit in question is a defamation lawsuit.

I confess: it is for breach of contract that I am most annoyed with Facebook. The company brought us all in with an openness ethos and now relentlessly pushes progressive talking points. I suppose it’s futile to compete with Facebook’s lawyers on grounds of Terms of Use agreements, so perhaps that’s why the focus is on slander and libel and all that. 

It is as liars and promise-breakers that Facebook’s ideological tyrants most grate.

What they did to John Stossel is unconscionable. But, sadly, not nearly uncommon enough.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights national politics & policies

You Kill Me!

Biden, Covid, Facebook, censorship

“Facebook isn’t killing people,” President Joe Biden informed us yesterday. 

At least, “That’s what I meant,” he clarified ever-so-confusingly. 

Meant last Friday, after a reporter mentioned “COVID misinformation” and asked Joe: “What’s your message to social media platforms like Facebook?”

“They’re killing people,” replied the president. “I mean, it really, look — the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated. And they’re killing people.”

CNBC noted that Facebook “reacted defensively” to Biden’s friendly murder accusations, failing to hit LIKE on the administration’s characterization of its pandemic performance. 

“The facts show that Facebook is helping save lives,” a company spokesperson countered. 

“My hope is that Facebook, instead of taking it personally that somehow I’m saying Facebook is killing people,” Mr. Biden chided the social media giant, “that they would do something about the misinformation, the outrageous misinformation about the vaccine.” 

After all, the Biden Administration has certainly rolled up its sleeves, as White House press secretary Jen Psaki put it: “We’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.”

Yes, behind the scenes, this administration works with these behemoth social media corporations to help determine what hundreds millions of Americans will be permitted to say and share and discuss — on matters such as medicine, theories of disease origins, etc. 

Didn’t we just ride this pony? Remember the supposedly baseless, debunked, conspiracy-nut-fueled Wuhan lab-leak theory? 

That idea was blocked from us by Facebook (and Google and YouTube) at the behest of Big Government Science . . . until just weeks ago.

It’s hard to keep up. 

Perhaps we are not supposed to.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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The Colluders

censorship, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube

Big Tech social media companies that once boasted of providing open forums now routinely ban speech that they disagree with — speech about elections, pandemics, Wuhan labs, or what have you.

How much of this suppression is private and independently initiated? How much is imposed at the behest of government officials who are supposed to respect First Amendment rights?

Government officials not only say that people should not say such-and-such; they also, increasingly, either complain that social media companies don’t do enough to gag people or herald the extent to which they do so.

Earlier this year, Reuters reported that “the White House has been reaching out to social media companies including Facebook, Twitter and Alphabet Inc’s Google about clamping down on COVID misinformation. . . .”

Now the American Freedom Law Center is suing Twitter and President Biden so that the question of whether the government is in effect “deputizing” private organizations to assault freedom of speech can be adjudicated.

The Center is filing on behalf of Colleen Huber, a doctor Twitter censored and suspended for saying the wrong thing about COVID-19. Of course, there are many other victims of the same policy, and it the Center seeking class-action status for the lawsuit.

The government has been enlisting social-media moguls as foot soldiers in a propaganda war. Whether this is done openly or behind closed doors, this war on free speech violates the Constitution. 

As we must hope the outcome of this legal action affirms.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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The Worshipful and the Incurious

Fauci, Covid, Facebook, ban

Did the recent pandemic begin as a leak from a lab in Wuhan, China?

Who knows?

But in these United States there suddenly appears serious — even bipartisan — interest in finding out.

I’ve been curious for some time, but why wasn’t more of the media interested from the beginning? Why were questions about the Wuhan Institute of Virology as well as the questioners often attacked?  

“[T]he newspapers I read and the TV shows I watched had assured me on many occasions that the lab-leak theory wasn’t true,” Thomas Frank, the progressive historian and author, explains in The Guardian, “that it was a racist conspiracy theory, that only deluded Trumpists believed it, that it got infinite pants-on-fire ratings from the fact-checkers,” adding that he “always trusted the mainstream news media.”

Thank goodness Senator Rand Paul confronted Dr. Fauci, again, leading to Fauci acknowledging the need for further investigation into the Wuhan lab that performed research on bat coronaviruses, arguably including gain-of-function research, with indirect U.S. funding. 

“Renewed focus on Wuhan lab scrambles the politics of the pandemic,” was one of several recent explanatory Washington Post articles.

Politics? 

You don’t say!

“The shifting terrain highlights how much of the early debate on the virus’s origins was colored by America’s tribal politics,” the paper reported, “as Trump and his supporters insisted on China’s responsibility and many Democrats dismissed the idea out of hand . . .”

The Post should include itself when referring to Trump-blaming “Democrats.” 

Another article The Post dangled before readers captures the moment — “Facebook: Posts saying virus man-made no longer banned.” 

In addition to the media and social media failure on this lab-leak story, let’s not forget the “expert fail.” Mr. Frank fears that if Big Science is found to be the cause of the pandemic, it “could obliterate the faith of millions” in “the expert-worshiping values of modern liberalism.”

We should be so lucky. 

What’s next: a release of Fauci’s emails?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Threat/No Threat

Facebook, censorship

Last week, I asked whether the social media companies that mine our data — which they obtain from our posts — might not expend a little more attention to allowing us to mine our own data with more ease and sophistication.

Today, let’s look at the biggest problem.

Politics.

Facebook and Twitter initially gloried in enabling users to easily communicate political ideas and activism. 

Then they realized that people don’t all agree, and that platform headmen Zuckerberg’s and Dorsey’s friends got upset when they lost, blaming Facebook and Twitter for allowing “democracy” to be compromised.

Now, that was overblown. Democracy wins when people use communication technology to convince others — just so long as they do not opt out of democracy’s integral respect for minority rights. 

Which is what Democrats accused Republicans — Trump was “obviously” authoritarian. 

Which is what Republicans also accused Democrats — and throwing people off a supposedly non-partisan platform for partisan reasons sure looks anti-democratic.

Robby Soave, arguing to the contrary at Reason, says that “Both the Left and the Right Are Exaggerating the Threat Posed by Facebook.” His article’s blurb boasts his thesis: “Facebook can’t kill, jail, or tax you. It can only stop you from posting on Facebook.”

True — but is it true enough? The political ramifications of Facebook’s de-platforming strike me as a great breach of contract — not just a matter of no physical threat. Plus, as mentioned Monday and previously, big tech is not immune to Washington’s political pressure and massive financial clout.

Meanwhile, Mr. Soave quotes Candace Owens, whose advice seems apt to me: “Twitter and Facebook are Fascist companies” that we should be “slowly migrating away from. . . .”

Soave is spot-on to highlight the limits to Facebook’s clout, reminding that we can stop feeding their data mining operations.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Reddit Redacts the Internet

Social Media, censorship, Odin

The watchdog group Judicial Watch has obtained evidence that the government of California and the Biden camp violated the First Amendment rights of Americans during the 2020 presidential campaign. 

In at least a couple dozen cases, social media companies complied with governmental requests to delete posts containing “misinformation,” the new code word for “stuff that I don’t want people to see or discuss.” 

But hey: were all materials containing “misinformation” deleted from the annals of humankind, historians would be left with maybe ten or twelve pages and scrolls of primary documents. Into the trash? Herodotus, Josephus, Gibbon!

On the other hand, the social-media giants often curtail online discourse without any apparent urging by government censors.

Example? The popular discussion group Reddit has taken upon itself to block users from viewing the videos hosted by certain popular alternatives to YouTube like Rumble and BitChute. Reddit has China-walled links to the videos regardless of content. The problem, it seems, is that Rumble and BitChute are too much in favor of free speech.

Now, it may be that Reddit does its redactions in eager pursuit of its own ideological agenda rather than in obedience to some politician(s), but questions remain. When it comes to suppressing voices that socialist social media moguls find politically uncongenial, how much is reluctant submission to government pressure and how much is spontaneous voluntary initiative?

I’d like to know. 

Barring any likelihood of a certain answer, we citizens must vigilantly watch governments — along with the tech firms receiving lucrative government contracts.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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