Politics

The horror: Fox report suggests ‘disinformation’ pages on Facebook promote Trump, disparage Clinton

An article published Wednesday at Fox News suggested, rather underhandedly, that conservative Facebook pages are engaged in “disinformation” and do the unthinkable — promote Donald Trump while disparaging Hillary Clinton.

The article, titled, “Army veteran wages war on social-media disinformation,” centers around 33-year-old Army veteran Kris Goldsmith and his effort to get Facebook to wipe out pages allegedly run by fake accounts that target veterans.

According to the Fox report:

He was seeking last year to gauge the popularity of the Facebook page for his employer, Vietnam Veterans of America. The first listing was an impostor account called “Vietnam Vets of America” that had stolen his group’s logo and had more than twice as many followers.

Mr. Goldsmith, a 33-year-old Army veteran, sent Facebook what he thought was a straightforward request to take down the bogus page. At first, Facebook told him to try to work it out with the authors of the fake page, whom he was never able to track down. Then, after two months, Facebook deleted it.

So far, so good, right?  After all, no one should be allowed to steal logos, etc., from other pages and present them as their own, especially if the goal is to con unsuspecting veterans. But it doesn’t end there, as the report states:

Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?

The experience launched him on a hunt for other suspicious Facebook pages that target military personnel and veterans by using patriotic messages and fomenting political divisions. It has become a full-time job.

According to the article, Goldsmith flagged some 100 pages he didn’t like for one reason or another.  He “sits for hours and clicks links, keeping extensive notes and compiling elaborate spreadsheets on how pages are interconnected, and tracing them back, when possible, to roots in Russia, Eastern Europe or the Middle East.”

Keep in mind that Facebook already has a small army doing this work.

Then there’s this:

About two dozen of the pages Mr. Goldsmith flagged, with a combined following of some 20 million, have been deleted, often coinciding with Facebook’s purges of Russian- and Iranian-linked disinformation pages—including a separate crackdown by the company last week on domestic actors.

The Fox article closes with this interesting paragraph (Emphasis added):

Several of the pages Mr. Goldsmith has studied expressly catered to conservative audiences and frequently promoted divisive memes depicting President Trump favorably on issues involving veterans, illegal immigration and the National Football League. While posts didn’t specifically discuss congressional candidates seeking election in next month’s midterms, they often promoted Mr. Trump’s 2020 re-election bid while disparaging Hillary Clinton as a criminal who deserved jail time.

It’s easy for one to conclude from this report that pages and sites leftists and social media censors (redundant, I know) view as spreading “disinformation” have at least two common traits — they support Donald Trump and oppose Hillary Clinton.

Translation: Only one point of view is to be tolerated.  Anything else is “disinformation” and deserves to be censored.

As we reported, one of the pages taken down during Facebook’s Kristallnacht-like purge was Uncle Sam’s Misguided Children, a page with more than two million followers.  Nothing on the page was false and the administrators/editors are real people — very real.  One of them, in fact, Faye Higbee, not only contributes to this page, but is also a personal friend.

The owner, Rick Ferran, “Tank” to his friends, is a Marine Corps veteran who escaped Communist Cuba as a very young man.  I have personally spoken with Ferran a number of times since 2013 when his page was first torn down.

Another page torn down supported veterans who suffer from PTSD.  That page also offered news and commentary from a patriotic, conservative point of view.

Brian Kolfage, a triple-amputee veteran who runs the Right Wing News website, also lost that page plus another — Military Grade Coffee — a site that supports veterans through sales of merchandise.

One cannot help but wonder if Goldsmith’s efforts were partly to blame for these pages being taken down.

Kolfage has since launched an effort to fight Facebook’s censorship and a GoFundMe page has been set up to help facilitate legal action against the social media giant.

Meanwhile, the propaganda effort continues — even at the network that professes to be “fair and balanced.”

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Joe Newby

A 10-year veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps, Joe ran for a city council position in Riverside, Calif., in 1991 and managed successful campaigns for the Idaho state legislature. Co-author of "Banned: How Facebook enables militant Islamic jihad," Joe wrote for Examiner.com from 2010 until it closed in 2016 and his work has been published at Newsbusters, Spokane Faith and Values and other sites. He now runs the Conservative Firing Line.

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