MENLO PARK, CA – Meta, aka Facebook, simply cannot help itself. Four years after Meta head Mark Zuckerberg dumped tens of millions of dollars helping to get Joe Biden elected while throttling information helpful to the Trump campaign, the social media company appears to be at it again.
In a post on X, Brendan Carr, a Republican commissioner with the Federal Communications Commission, wrote that Facebook is censoring the fact that the Biden-Harris administration has failed to connect anyone to the internet despite US taxpayers dropping $42 billion on the effort.
Facebook is censoring that as “false information,” not because anyone has actually been connected but because the government is spending money to attempt to get people connected. Get it? Moreover, what is the source of Facebook’s “misinformation” claim? Biden-Harris administration officials, hardly “third-party” fact checkers.
In August, ABC News reported that Zuckerberg told the House Judiciary Committee that he regretted the company’s caving to Biden administration pressure to censor some COVID-19 posts during the pandemic.
In 2021, Kamala Harris promised broadband services would be brought to “rural America today” through the Broadband, Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program, a significant and pricey government initiative. Despite that, and 1,000 days later, not one person has been connected to the government’s broadband, which is the point being made on X.
Facebook’s fact-checker is USA Today, a media outlet that has become a parody of itself with its “fact checkers” and is clearly intervening on behalf of the Biden-Harris administration. This raises serious questions about the independence and objectivity of Facebook’s fact-checking process.
In another post on X, Carr wrote that nobody has been connected to the Internet through the BEAD program, no shovels of dirt have been turned, and no money has been spent on building out Internet infrastructure yet.
Carr confirmed with USA Today that their “fact checkers” were members of the Biden-Harris administration.
Carr wrote, “This ‘fact check’ has other problems too. While it purports to check the claim that no dollars have been spent on Internet access, it instead focuses on whether funds have lawfully been spent on planning to connect people.
Carr also found that USA Today had violated its own policies on “fact-checking” by failing to use “unbiased sources,” “gather[ing] a variety of perspectives,” and “seek official, nonpartisan sources.”
In a later post, Carr wrote that Facebook had removed the censorship screen from the post about Internet connectivity but noted that “systemic issues” with Facebook’s “fact-checking” remain.
A Meta spokesperson said in a statement, “Meta publishes clear rating guidelines for third-party fact checkers who independently review and rate content. In this instance, the rating fell outside of those guidelines, and we have removed it.”
If anyone wonders why many have lost faith in mainstream media and social media, this is proof positive of why.
This post was originally published on here
