Responding to a scathing op-ed by Conservative Partnership Institute Senior Director of Policy Rachel Bovard, Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo., issued a tweet saying in no uncertain terms that Facebook, the premier member of what I now call the “Silicon Valley Axis of Evil,” cannot be trusted and needs to be broken up.
“Facebook can’t be trusted. We have to break them up,” he said on Twitter, citing Bovard’s article in the New York Post.
Facebook can’t be trusted. We have to break them up. https://t.co/gGZtriYhFw
— Ken Buck (@BuckForColorado) November 23, 2021
Bovard notes that in 2019, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke at Georgetown University and pledged to “fight to uphold as wide a definition of freedom of expression as possible,” promising in uncertainty to “err on the side of greater expression.”
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“I don’t think most people want to live in a world where you can only post things that tech companies judge to be 100 percent true,” he said at the time.
“Such declarations seem almost quaint now, if not outright lies,” Bovard wrote, adding:
In the wake of the 2020 election, COVID-19 and every remotely controversial event that has followed, Twitter, Facebook and Google — America’s premier speech platforms, which house and shape our national discourse — have taken the decidedly opposite approach, limiting the free flow of information, dialogue and any opinion that runs counter to what the Silicon Valley speech gods and their army of partisan fact-checkers have singlehandedly determined as fact.
Speech, as such, is no longer allowed on the platforms. Just correct speech. And under the great dystopian valance that cloaks America’s major speech venues, the speech the platforms deem correct often turns out to be demonstrably wrong.
She cited the way Zuckerberg’s digital empire unilaterally declared, without the benefit of a trial, that Kyle Rittenhouse was automatically guilty:
Consider how Facebook, in particular, treated the circumstances surrounding Kyle Rittenhouse, the teen acquitted last week of all charges in the self-defense killings of two men and the shooting of another during last summer’s riots in Kenosha, Wis. Immediately after the incident occurred, and despite video evidence which made a self-defense charge instantly plausible, Facebook declared it a “mass murder” and under that justification blocked searches for Rittenhouse’s name and any content in “praise or support” for him on the site — including links to contribute to his legal defense and videos purporting to show Rittenhouse providing aid to protesters.
In other words, Facebook determined that the only speech allowed on its platform was to declare Rittenhouse’s guilt, not his innocence. Perhaps prompted by Facebook’s actions or merely in spite of them, PayPal cut off affiliation with fundraising efforts for Rittenhouse, and so did GoFundMe.
She asked a series of very good questions that deserve answers:
A jury has acquitted Rittenhouse on all charges — those brought by the prosecutors and by Facebook — so now what? Will all the accounts which were banned or otherwise punished for speaking in his defense be reinstated? Will the self-righteous fact-checkers at PolitiFact be held accountable in any way? Will Facebook admit it was wildly wrong or simply pretend like it didn’t make a blundering, ham-fisted judgment about Rittenhouse absent any due process, one which contributed to shaping a false national narrative?
Good luck with that.
And, she noted, this wasn’t the first time the site once dubbed “Iron FistBook” by cartoonist A.F. Branco, jumped the gun, mixing up reality with left-wing narrative and fantasy.
So, The Wall Street Journal asked, “When does ‘misinformation’ stop being misinformation on social media?” The editorial board answered, saying, it is “when Democratic government authorities give permission.”
“And therein lies the rub for Facebook, which is decidedly no longer the bastion of free speech its founder once proclaimed. It is a central hub of America’s discourse, one which bears no accountability for being wrong about major cultural questions — despite the fact that in doing so, it becomes the purveyor of misinformation it deems only others to be,” Bovard said.
The real problem, as American-Israeli Adina Kutnicki and I stated in our 2016 book, “Banned: How Facebook Enables Militant Islamic Jihad,” is that the company acts like a government unto itself, accountable to no one. And we only have our very own Congress to thanks for that.
Rep. Buck is right. Facebook cannot be trusted. And that problem has been around for a very long time.
Related:
- Facebook’s Name Change/Re-branding And Its Ghoulish Double Entendre
- Poll: More Than Half Of Americans Blame Big Tech For 2020 Election Interference
- Does Rebranding Facebook Signal a Real Change in What Matters?
- Facebook’s ‘Dangerous Individuals’ List Leaks, Lists Right-Wing Activists Alongside Islamic Terrorists
- Phony Facebook Whistleblower Served On Team That Suppressed Hunter Biden Laptop Story
Turn your back on Big Tech oligarchs and join the New Resistance NOW! Facebook, Google, and other members of the Silicon Valley Axis of Evil are now doing everything they can to deliberately silence conservative content online, so please be sure to check out our MeWe page here, check us out at ProAmerica Only and follow us at Parler, Social Cross and Gab. You can also follow us on Twitter at @co_firing_line, and at the new social media site set up by members of Team Trump, GETTR.
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