Mediaboss Marketing

(Pixabay)

Today is a doozy: Facebook and Twitter decided that their users shouldnt see or be able to read a particular article in the New York Post, and why so many Democrats perceived the Post story as a traumatic flashback to former FBI director James Comeys letter about Hillary Clinton on October 28, 2016.

There Is No Credible Reason for This Kind of Targeted Suppression

The editors of National Review have something important to say about the way two of the largest and most prominent social-media companies, Facebook and Twitter, decided to effectively block access to a news article in the New York Post.

Andy Stone, Facebooks policy communications manager (and, per his bio, a former staffer for Barbara Boxer, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and the House Majority PAC), announced that the social-media giant would begin reducing the distribution of aNew York Postinvestigation into emails purporting that Joe Biden met with a top executive from the Ukrainian natural-gas firm Burisma Holdings at the behest of his son Hunter Biden.

Bad idea.

Instead of simply asking pertinent questions, or debunking thePosts reporting, a media blackout was initiated. A number of well-known journalists warned colleagues and their sizable social-media audiences not to share the story.

By the afternoon, Twitter had joined Facebook in suppressing the article, not only barring its users from sharing it with followers, but barring them sharing it through direct messages as well. It locked the accounts of White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, thePost, and many others for retweeting the story.

There is no credible reason for this kind of targeted suppression. Over the past five years there have been scores of dramatic scoops written by major media outlets such as theNew York Times, theWashington Post, and CNN that were based on faulty information provided by unknown sources that turned out to be incorrect. Not once has Facebook or Twitter concerned itself with the sourcing methods of reporters. Not once did it censor any of those pieces.

The editors conclude the mentality at work in the high commands of Facebook and Twitter further damages the reputation of Big Tech. For another, it renders the industry more susceptible to a new regulatory regime already being championed by some in Congress. Mostly, however, it just makes the story theyre trying to suppress a far bigger deal.

Last night, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey offered a tweet conceding, our communication around our actions on the New York Post article was not great. And blocking URL sharing via tweet or DM with zero context as to why were blocking: unacceptable.

He linked to a series of tweets from the corporate account declaring:

The images contained in the articles include personal and private information like email addresses and phone numbers which violate our rules. As noted this morning, we also currently view materials included in the articles as violations of our Hacked Materials Policy. Commentary on or discussion about hacked materials, such as articles that cover them but do not include or link to the materials themselves, arent a violation of this policy. Our policy only covers links to or images of hacked material themselves. We know we have more work to do to provide clarity in our product when we enforce our rules in this manner. We should provide additional clarity and context when preventing the Tweeting or DMing of URLs that violate our policies.

If you believe that news organizations should never publish anything that was not legally obtained or distributed, you would bar the publication of the Pentagon Papers and President Trumps tax returns.

Note that according to the New York Post, the information wasnt hacked by any traditional definition: The email is contained in a trove of data that the owner of a computer repair shop in Delaware said was recovered from a MacBook Pro laptop that was dropped off in April 2019 and never retrieved. The computer was seized by the FBI, and a copy of its contents made by the shop owner shared with The Post this week by former Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

In fact, the dynamic at work in the New York Post story about the emails regarding Biden is the same as the New York Times scoop about the presidents tax returns. That computer repair shop in Delaware has legal access to the files in the computer (because they were presumably hired by the FBI to fix something) but not legal authority to distribute whats in those files. The New York Times source has legal access to the presidents tax returns, but not legal authority to distribute whats in those tax returns. There is no moral distinction, just a partisan one.

The distinction between being a platform and being a publisher is impossible to ignore, and the longtime insistence from those big tech companies that theyre not publishers is no longer operable. For years, they insisted they were no more responsible for what gets written on Facebook then the people who build bathroom stall walls are for someone writing for a good time call Jenny at 867-5309.

The spectacularly wrongheaded decision-making at Facebook and Twitter is going to set off a lot of deliberately obtuse semantic arguments about whether or not what the companies did can legitimately be labeled censorship, driven by those who insist that only government actions can constitute censorship.

As we all know and are unnecessarily reminded every time one of these controversies comes down the pike, Facebook and Twitter are private companies. Users sign on to operate under the companies rules and judgment. The U.S. Constitution does not guarantee you a right to speak your mind on a private companys online platform. If you go to the New York Times and say, I have a terrific and important freelance article or op-ed or letter to the editor, and the Times declines to run your submission in its pages, no one believes theyve been censored.

But the companies touted themselves as neutral, minimally restrictive platforms and have, year by year, morphed into publishers with broader (and vaguer) limitations on what can be posted and shared on their sites. As I wrote back in 2018, when Apple, Google, Facebook, and Spotify erased most of the posts and videos on their services from raving lunatic/radio- and web-show host Alex Jones, none of the people who run these companies are constitutional scholars specializing in First Amendment cases, nor did they ever aspire to be in that role. They set up and joined these companies to make money and now theyre in the weird position of American Public Discourse Police.

Facebooks slogan used to be, make the world more open and connected. Twitters slogan was, see whats happening. They sold themselves on the notion that you could have a platform, and make your voice heard, no matter who you were. They clearly envisioned a society full of pleasant, relatively polite stamp collectors and poodle owners and wildlife photographers and Trekkies, groups of individuals who would want to connect and share their passions and who would do so in an amiable, harmonious, focus-group-pleasing way that could never harm others.

Except society isnt just made up of nice people with noncontroversial interests and hobbies. Our world has more than a few lunatics, hate groups, conspiracy theorists, Holocaust deniers, violent criminals, and every other unsavory type, and much to the surprise of these companies, they want their voices heard, too! They may be particularly driven to share their views online, because people are so unreceptive to their views when they share them offline.

And for a long while, most people didnt mind Facebook and Twitter and the rest taking a tougher stance to remove lunatics, hate groups, conspiracy theorists, Holocaust deniers, violent criminals, etc. Although sometimes the line between the dangerously unacceptable and simply odd or outlandish is hard to draw. QAnon is a nutty conspiracy theory, but so is the idea that Trump has been an asset of Russian intelligence since 1987. Smart, seemingly normal people can buy into conspiracy theories.

Now that theyve built their user base, Facebook and Twitter and other social-media companies want to change the rules. They want to limit what sorts of political news stories can be shared, which was never how they sold themselves or what they promised. No one complains about the New York Times refusing to publish a letter to the editor, because the Times never sold itself as the place where everyone has a voice and everyone gets a chance to speak their mind.

They might as well update the user agreement language: User agrees to believe all denials from Joe Biden regarding anything involving his sons international business partners.

The Traumatic Flashbacks of Comeys Letter

Why did the tech companies, and quite a few big names in mainstream journalism, go to DefCon One on a story with evidence suggesting Biden lied about meeting a Ukrainian politician?

Allow me to suggest that yesterday, a lot of people had flashbacks to FBI director James Comey sending a letter to Congress announcing the reopening of the email probe on October 28, 2016, eleven days before the November 8 election.

The fact that President Trumps margin over Hillary Clinton was so narrow he won Michigan by 10,704 votes, Pennsylvania by 49,543 votes, and Wisconsin by 27,257 votes means that any one factor can plausibly be labeled the decisive one. Many Democrats reacted to Clintons shocking loss by looking for the most convenient explanation possible. For some, it was Russian disinformation on social media. For others, it was Jill Stein siphoning off votes that Hillary Clinton deserved. For others, it was that the country was full of racist deplorables, even though many of these voters had just cast ballots for Barack Obama twice.

But I suspect quite a few Democrats chose to believe that it was Comeys letter which decided the election. Never mind that Comey wrote another letter, two days before the election, declaring that the reopened investigation had found nothing new or incriminating. (Yes, 24 million Americans cast early ballots in 2016, but thats out of 136 million total votes in the presidential election.)

This is one of the reasons political journalism matters. What happens is important; what we choose to learn from what happens is almost as important. Many elite progressives chose to learn the lesson that late-breaking news stories that look bad for the Democrat can elect the worst Republican in the world, and thus that scenario must be prevented, at any cost.

If a person believes that a big scoop involving the FBI looking into emails of the Democratic nominee led to Trumps election . . . how do you think they will react to the New York Post announcing this week they have a big scoop involving the FBI looking into emails of the Democratic nominee?

ADDENDUM: In the middle of all this, keep in mind that Joe Biden does not believe that Burisma was attempting to influence U.S. policy when they hired his son, that his son was hired on his own merits, and not because his father was vice president, but because hes a very bright guy.

Read the rest here:
Censored and Suppressed - National Review

People line up for taxis across the street from the New York Times headquarters in 2013. (Carlo Allegri/Reuters)

In the New York Times, Emily Bazelon reminds us once again that an enormous number of journalists, law professors, and other academics simply cannot be trusted to defend the First Amendment and, in fact, that they spend an increasing amount of time coming up with what they believe are new arguments for censorship. In a key paragraph, Bazelon writes that:

Its an article of faith in the United States that more speech is better and that the government should regulate it as little as possible. But increasingly, scholars of constitutional law, as well as social scientists, are beginning to question the way we have come to think about the First Amendments guarantee of free speech. They think our formulations are simplistic and especially inadequate for our era.

In addition:

These scholars argue something that may seem unsettling to Americans: that perhaps our way of thinking about free speech is not the best way. At the very least, we should understand that it isnt the only way. Other democracies, in Europe and elsewhere, have taken a different approach. Despite more regulations on speech, these countries remain democratic

There is nothing novel about the arguments presented in Bazelons piece. Indeed, they are exactly the same arguments that have always been made by people who would like to be more powerful than they are. And we are by no means obligated to buy into her euphemisms. When Bazelon writes that democracies, in Europe and elsewhere, have taken a different approach, or that the principle of free speech has a different shape and meaning in Europe, she means that governments in Europe use violence to prevent people from saying things that they dont want them to say. When she refers to regulations on speech she means censorship enforced by the police. When she observes that some liberals have lost patience with rehashing debates about ideas they find toxic, she means that those people have abandoned freedom of expression both legally and culturally, and, having privately decided what is true and what is false, have decided to ruin the lives of anyone who dissents. When she proposes that our formulations are simplistic, she means that people cannot be trusted with the unalienable liberties they inherited, so experts must step into the breach. When she waxes lyrical about the mid-20th century arrangement, during which broadcasters were held to a standard of public trusteeship, in which the right to use the airwaves came with a mandate to provide for democratic discourse, she means that she would like the government to decide which broadcasts counted as a public service and that the public would be better off if given a choice between three different versions of the same thing. When she suggests our way of thinking about free speech is not the best way she means that we should tear up the First Amendment. She can put it how she likes; the answer is No.

All in all, Bazelon provides only two examples of what happens when the First Amendment isnt applied rigorously in the United States, both of which should have been sufficiently horrifying to have made her reconsider her premise:

From 1798 to 1801, more than two dozen people, including several newspaper editors, were prosecuted by the administration of President John Adams under the Alien and Sedition Acts, which made malicious writing a crime. Protesters were also jailed for criticizing the government during World War I.

Whether Bazelon thinks these incidents were good or bad is unclear. Either way, she concludes with the preposterous suggestion that free speech of the sort we enjoy in the United States may, in fact, be an enabler of fascism. Herbert Marcuse has a good deal to answer for, but hes still no master of disguise.

Link:
The Censors Will Never Give Up - National Review

Brian Armstrong, CEO of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, revealed in a late September blog post that the company would prohibit employees from debating political or social issues, deeming this a distraction from the companys mission.

Armstrong doubled down on his position during a virtual all-hands held on October 1, billed as an AMA (for ask me anything), from which Motherboard obtained audio. The AMA was meant to further explain the companys new apolitical direction for those who might consider accepting a severance package that was offered to any employee who felt uncomfortable. Executives also explained when and where dissent would be appropriate, and explained why they required employees to delete specific political Slack messages.

This, at a company that works with cryptocurrencies intended to replace government banking systems in order to create a more free world.

Are you a Coinbase employee who knows more about the company's new direction and how it's being handled? Using a non-work phone or computer, contact Edward Ongweso Jr securely on Signal at (413) 225 2938, or emailedward.ongweso@vice.com.

During the meeting, Armstrong claimed there is a silent majority at Coinbase that agreed with his decision but feared reprisal from colleagues. Armstrong and Coinbase leadership, however, failed to soothe fears that this policy would police employees if they voiced opinions that did not align with Armstrong or this silent majority.

One former Coinbase employee who left the company after the AMA and to whom Motherboard provided anonymity due to fear of industry reprisal said that these assurances were insufficient and workers feared surveillance and censorship.

These fears are not unfounded. Emile Choi, Coinbase's chief operating officer, explained that at least two employees were asked to delete Slack posts, and that HR head L.J. Brock proactively reached out to employees to explain why their posts would be taken down. He had a very productive conversation with both of them and they understood the context, she said.

One employee asked if Coinbase leadership thought that this was taking away employee power to start a discussion except with 300 character questions in an AMA format. It seems like Coinbase is stunting internal discussion.

Choi said that the entire executive team was aligned on Armstrongs post and policy, and that the new culture is focused on what unites us and what we face in the world, which is building toward our mission, Choi said. The goal was not intended to be harsh, it wasnt intended to land in a way where people felt they were being policed.

She then explained that the place for political discussion or dissent was in dedicated Slack channels for sensitive topics: While you cant try to sell folks on your belief the Flying Spaghetti Monster should be elected president, you can establish a channel where people interested in electing the Flying Spaghetti Monster can share their thoughts.

Theres fear from employees about monitoring in all channels, including private ones, the former Coinbase employee told Motherboard. The biggest fear is that employees will be confronted on what they say or do on their work and personal deviceswork systems are often on personal devices. This already happened when writers of old Slack posts were confronted by leadership and asked to delete posts.

Problems have been building at Coinbase for the past year, which culminated in a June 4 walkout that followed another company-wide AMA shortly after the killing of George Floyd by police. During that AMA, Armstrong resisted the idea of making a public statement in support of Black Lives Matter, but backtracked after the walkout and posted a series of messages in support of BLM on Twitter later that day.

Fast forward to late September, and Armstrongs announcement that political discussions at work are not acceptable and anyone uncomfortable may leave. According to the company, it lost 60 employees, or 5 percent of its workforce as a result of this decision.

One of the earliest questions raised in the AMA was What counts as political? Armstrong avoided specifying what topics could lead to discipline or firing, but offered work visas and employee resource groups as examples of incidentally political but primarily work-related things that were a totally appropriate conversation to have at Coinbase.

One employee shared their concern that a ban on political topics at work would mainly serve to silence people whose lived experiences point to systemic problems. For some, sharing their own personal experiences and traumas can be advocating or seen as advocating for certain causes, the employee wrote. Can we really support each other with those policies being kept outside of this workplace?

The former employee that Motherboard spoke with said that there is a disconnect between Coinbases supposedly apolitical direction and the inherent politics of a company working to build a new financial system.

Crypto is political, so the sense is that doing this stems from leadership (Brian) not agreeing with certain political stances. Its easier to just prohibit any discussion at all, said the former Coinbase employee.

It comes off to employees as being ruled in fear because social issues arent a distraction, they added. They cause the financial problems that crypto wants to fix. You cant fix one without the othertheyre hand-in-hand. The root is the social issues.

On top of banning discussion and forcing employees to delete Slack messages, the AMA revealed other instances of opaqueness on the part of management. When an employee asked if management would share the results of internal surveys and feedback around the new policy, Choi said no and explained, It's really meant to be feedback for the seniors.

There has been talk among former and current employees of creating a #deleteCB campaign, the former employee told Motherboard, hoping to help people move their money to more socially responsible platforms and competitors that have been trying to get in contact with Coinbase workers: "It's rooted in the understanding that we can't collectively fix the financial problems that crypto tries to solve without addressing the underlying social issues that create the problem in the first place."

The former employee, who said they have been in contact with workers who chose to stay, said that some Coinbase workers feel they must shut up and be complicit unless they want to risk losing their jobs.

From my experience and discussions, the most frightening thing about this is the timing. Were in a pandemic, theres a political election, said the former Coinbase employee. Many did not leave because even though there was a generous severance offer, its still so scary to go back out in the market right now. People felt trapped.

Coinbase acknowledged Motherboards request for comment and said these accusations are quite extreme and absolutely false. In a follow up call the company declined to go on the record and would not be specific about what allegations it believed are false. It then missed a deadline to respond to our request for comment. We will update if we hear back.

Read more:
Coinbases New Direction Is Censorship, Leaked Audio Reveals - VICE

From Pokemon to Gumball, sometimes cartoons just push it too far and end up getting pushed back by the censors.

There are tons of cartoon innuendos that happened in older shows, fromSpongebobtoInvader Zim, and honestly, it's a very surprising fact that some of these jokes even made it into the shows at all. There are some shows likeRen And Stimpy orMr. Meaty that made their living off of Gross-Out humor and body horror, which doesn't seem like a sustainable model for a kids' show in the first place.

RELATED:15 Cartoon Episodes That Were Too Controversial To Air

Invader Zim was particularly bad about this since Nickelodeon specifically did a call for a television show that would cover their 12-16 year old demographic. Let's take a look at some scenes like this that didn't quite make it to air.

Ren And Stimpy was always known for pushing the envelope, so much so that eventually John Kricfalusi got fired from his own show. John K. was fired for plenty of other reasons, but the scene that got him canceled wasn't the first time he had gotten a scene pulled from the show.

The first scene that Nickelodeon got rid of was in an episode where Ren's cousin Sven comes over, and Stimpy and Sven spend the day together. The issue is when they hide in a closet together, and Stimpy decides they can play a game called "Sword Swallower".No need toextrapolate that point, but that's why the scene was pulled (although it's available on DVDs for any curious fans).

Denno Senshi Porygonis probably one of the most infamous cartoon episodes ever to air. It's the 38th episode of the 3rd season, in which something is wrong with the Pokeballs, so the team enters them to figure out what's going on.

The worst offender in the show is when Pikachu delivers a thunderbolt to a cyber missile, after which the screen rapidly flashes between red and blue. This event gave seizures to tons of people across Japan, putting about 685 people in the hospital. It was known in the Japanese press as the Pokemon Shock. Stocks fell by about 5%, the episode was pulled from the rotation for all time, and it's never been aired again.

This is the actual episode that got John K. fired, in addition to the fact that he was notoriously hard to work with and did so many edits of the show that were already completed that episodes were frequently turned in well past their airing deadline. In the episodeMan's Best Friend, we see Ren savagely beat a man with an oar.

RELATED:Parks & Rec: 10 Controversies That Almost Killed The Show

The man who was beaten is named George Liquor for some reason, which is already pretty weird for a kid's show. There's a sequence where Ren very visibly snaps in a very realistic and dark way, with surreal, splotchy backgrounds behind him. After this, he beats the man until he's black and blue, swollen, with bulging eyes.

For whatever reason, thePowerpuff Girls show decided it needed to take the George OrwellAnimal Farm route with one of their episodes, in which for some reason, a gnome shows up who starts a cult in which they have sacrificed happiness for peace.

The show has an incredibly biased depiction of what Communism is, and regardless of anyone's view on the economic system, it gets into some pretty weird and heavy topics for a kids' show about 3 little girl superheroes. He's also one of the only characters in the series who has straight up been killed, aside from some sentient broccoli and the Rowdy Rough Boys.

Rocko's Modern Life is pretty well-known for having some pretty racy jokes thrown into the mix more or less all the time. There was one episode where Rocko was a phone operator for an adult phone line, an episode where the word "hell" is plainly shown in text.

In the very second episode of the show, the first segment is entitled "Leap Frogs". The whole plot of the episode is already pretty weird, which can be summed up by saying that his neighbor Beverly Bighead is feeling unfilled in her relationship. She then invites Rocko over to "help her out around the house". She appears naked in the episode, shares an adulterous kiss with Rocko, and they watch a tape of frog mating together.

As with every anime that exists, Pokemon has a beach episode. Weirdly enough though, this might just be one of the more risque beach episodes that's happened in an anime that's aired for children. There's a pretty frequent thing in the show where Jessie and James seem to enjoy dressing in drag pretty frequently, generally for the sakes of a disguise.

RELATED:The 10 Most Controversial Animated Disney Movies, Ranked

The issue isn't with the crossdressing, thee issue enters into the equation when James for some reason decides to don a bikini complete with an inflatable chest. Misty, who is a minor, also partakes in a bikini contest, and the fact that James' chest isn't as flat as hers is played for laughs since it's demoralizing.

In the 1984Spider-Man television series, for whatever reason, they decided that they wanted to bring in Morbius as a villain. The censorship that happens with this character is pretty dumb, but at the same time, it's pretty odd that they decided to include this character in the series anyway. Morbius, for anyone who doesn't know, is a vampire. A vampire who drinks blood.

For some reason, there's some weird restriction (or was) against saying the word "blood" or showing a character sucking blood in a children's cartoon. Their solution to this was to make Morbius drink plasma, and he uses suction cups in his hands to acquire it.

Daria was a series that kind of pushed the limits for its time, both on MTV and on a relic of the early 2000s, called The N. The show frequently explored themes of drugs and sexuality, and despite the fact that it was a cartoon specifically meant for adults and for teenagers, the fact that the show was a cartoon made both censors and parents uncomfortable with the concept of the show exploring such mature themes.

RELATED:15 Controversies That Almost Ended Pixar

Another issue is that a lot of the sexuality hinted at was not of the heterosexual variety, making homophobic parents in the 90s extremely upset. It's ludicrous that this type of thing would be censored, but it definitely put a damper on the show.

Heff In A Handbasket is an episode ofRocko's Modern Life. The show was already well known for going too far pretty frequently, already having the episodeLeap Frogs on this list. Apparently, they didn't learn their lesson, because the episodeHeff In A Handbasket happened.

There was already an episode where the show explored Hell pretty heavily, but this episode took the Satanic hell imagery to another level. For whatever reason, censors have a major problem with anything that could present Christianity in a questionable light, which is a reason that a lot of Japanese RPGs have been censored when being ported over.

Happening in season 1 ofThe Amazing World Of Gumball, Darwin and Gumball share a kiss with each other and then go on to talk about how great it was. Having characters kiss in really any kid's show is pretty weird in the first place, but for a lot of censors in other countries, the fact that it was shared by two boys is again what put it over the top.

For some reason, there's still tons of censorship when it comes to LGBTQ+ themes, which in our current year is pretty sad. Oh, the kiss was also an accident and it's played for laughs anyway, so it really makes no sense that it was cut.

NEXT:15 Controversies That Almost Ended Great TV Shows

Next 10 Things About SpongeBob SquarePants That Make No Sense

Cody is an author from Ohio. When he's not writing, he enjoys improv comedy, making music with friends, and consuming whatever media he can. Before working for Valnet mainly on the Screen Rant site, he got his writing experience in doing music reviews and comic book scripts.

View post:
10 Scenes From Classic Cartoons That Didn't Make It Past Censors - Screen Rant

Facebook censored two advertisements from the pro-life group Susan B. Anthony Lists, claiming the videos contained partly false information about Democratic Presidential Nominee Joe Biden and VP Nominee Kamala Harriss views on late-term abortions.

The ads, which focus on the Democratic Partys position in support of abortion on demand and up until the moment of birth, were labeled by independent fact-checkers who claim to look carefully into claims from elected officials, reports from the media, and disinformation on social media to help you understand whats true and whats not.

The independent fact-checker, was NeverTrump website, The Dispatch, which labeled the ads as partly false because Biden has not explicitly stated that he supports late-term abortions, even though he has repeatedly said he wants no restrictions on a womans right to choose.

Biden has not expressed support for late-term abortionswhich, while not being a medical term, generally refers to abortions performed at 21 weeks or later. And neither candidate has voiced support for abortion up to the moment of birth, the fact-check reads.

Both Biden and Harris, however, have been very clear that they do not want restrictions on abortions, implying that late-term abortions would be approved.

Despite his flip-flopping on the issue, Biden now supports the revoking Hyde Amendment which would allow taxpayer-funding of abortion and advocates for federal funding of Planned Parenthood. He even claimed that he would make Roe v. Wade the law of the land if he is elected in November.

The only responsible response to that would be to pass legislation makingRoe the law of the land, said Biden. Thats what I would do.

The Dispatchs explanation of SBA Lists claims even quotes Biden saying that he votes for no restrictions on a womans right to be able to have an abortion under Roe v. Wade.

As National Reviews Ramesh Ponnuru notes, both Biden and Harris have sponsored bills that appear to keep abortion late in pregnancy legal even if the Supreme Court were to change its mind.

Harris supported the Womens Health Protection Act, which would codify Roe v. Wade and remove state restrictions on abortions and remove a prohibition on abortion after fetal viability. As a senator, Biden sponsored legislation to make abortion legal after viability in cases needed to protect health, but without ever defining what health protections that entailed.

The censorship comes just two days after Facebook announced it would be limiting distribution of the New York Posts bombshell story detailing former vice president Joe Bidens knowledge of his son Hunter Bidens foreign business dealings.

Big Tech and the media are teaming up to run interference for the Biden-Harris campaign on what is a losing issue for Democrats their shameful support for abortion on demand through birth, said SBA List President Marjorie Dannenfelser. This is the latest example of Facebook censoring political speech and is perfectly timed to shut down SBA Lists vital digital communications as we work to reach eight million voters in key battlegrounds in the final days before Election Day.

This is not the first time the pro-life advocates were censored by Facebook. In 2018, SBA List ran an ad criticizing Democratic Senate candidate Phil Bredesen for his abortion position, urging voters to consider the Republican candidate and now-Senator Marsha Blackburn. The ad was originally shut down by Facebook, but eventually reinstated.

When Facebook shut downsimilaradsof ours in 2018, they were forced to admit we were wrongly censored andapologized, Dannenfelser said. Now they have outsourced their censorship to the anti-Trump press, continually waging a suppression campaign specifically targeting pro-life conservative voices. We refuse to be silenced.

The group also keeps a running list on their website which shows almost 20 times pro-life information was censored by big tech.

Update: Shortly after this article was published, the Dispatch issued a statement claiming that the fact check was still in draft form and was accidentally published by the editorial staff.

The fact-check was published in error and in draft form, before it had been through final edits and our own internal fact-checking process, Editor and CEO of the Dispatch Stephen Hayes wrote. As a result, the viral post was assigned a partly false rating that we have determined is not justified after completing The Dispatchfact-checking process.

The Dispatch says that they have lifted the rating from the ads and apologized to the Women Speak Out PAC.

Despite their claims that the publication of the fact check was an accident, the Dispatch received backlash for retweeting the fact check article, which was posted to social media by the reporter three days before it was taken down.

Internal Facebook fact-checking procedure also requires fact-checking tags to be directly assigned by a person, which means that this partly false rating along with the link back to the Dispatchs article was personally approved by someone at the Dispatch or Facebook.

Anti-Trumper Jonah Goldberg, the Dispatchs editor-in-chief, however, failed to claim personal responsibility for the previously stated editorial error.

Jordan Davidson is a staff writer at The Federalist. She graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism.

Follow this link:
NeverTrump Website The Dispatch Colludes With Big Tech To Censor SBA List's Pro-Life Ads - The Federalist