Mark Zuckerberg has said Facebook and Instagram were wrong to censor posts about Covid during the pandemic and that the company should have fought pressure from the Biden administration.
In a letter to a US committee investigating online content moderation, Mr Zuckerberg said senior White House officials “repeatedly pressured” the company after Joe Biden was inaugurated in 2021.
He said that Facebook “made some choices” that it would not have made today.
In a letter to Jim Jordan, the Trump-supporting head of the House of Representatives’ Judiciary Committee, Mr Zuckerberg wrote: “In 2021, senior officials from the Biden administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain Covid-19 content, including humour and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree.
“Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions, including Covid-19-related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure.
“I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it. I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today.
“Like I said to our teams at the time, I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any administration in either direction – and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.”
During the pandemic, Facebook added misinformation alerts to users when they commented on or liked posts that were judged to contain false information about Covid.
It also deleted posts criticising the Covid vaccine, or suggesting that Covid was developed in a Chinese laboratory, a theory that has since become supported by some mainstream scientists and government agencies.
In the 2020 election campaign, Mr Biden had accused Facebook of “killing people” by not clamping down on Covid posts more enthusiastically. He later rowed back on the comments.
Mr Zuckerberg also said Facebook was wrong to suppress a New York Post story about Hunter Biden, Mr Biden’s son, which revealed that Hunter had offered business contacts access to his father when he was vice president.
He said the FBI had warned the company about a “potential Russian disinformation operation” about the Biden family. Facebook had demoted the story while it was reviewed by fact checkers, which Mr Zuckerberg said was a mistake.
The Hunter Biden laptop story, which was blocked by Twitter after it was published, was potentially damaging to Mr Biden’s election campaign. Blocking it has been seen by Republicans as proof of Silicon Valley’s Left-wing influence.
Elon Musk released a series of internal emails about the decision to block the story after buying Twitter.
The Republican-controlled House Judiciary Committee called Mr Zuckerberg’s admissions a “big win for free speech”.
Meanwhile, the White House defended its actions.
It said: “When confronted with a deadly pandemic, this administration encouraged responsible actions to protect public health and safety.
“Our
position has been clear and consistent: we believe tech companies and
other private actors should take into account the effects their actions
have on the American people, while making independent choices about the
information they present.” [SOURCE]
The anniversary of the botched evacuation of Kabul in 2021 brought back memories. My honored alma mater, the 82nd Airborne Division was called in at the last second to enforce the final stage of the pullout. Lack of leadership resulted in the loss of 13 heroes despite the best of efforts by the servicemen and women performing that evacuation, plus the disastrous rescue of thousands of US citizens and locals who helped us for the past 20 years.
I was attending the 75th annual convention of the 82nd Airborne Division Association in the days before this epic ending of our war in Afghanistan, in Houston where my brother from my time at Bragg in the mid-80's is currently the Chairman of the local Houston chapter that hosted the convention that year, and put together this little video about what it felt like when we heard the news break:
By: Margot Cleveland
August 26, 2024
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. excoriated the Democrat Party, U.S. government, and our supposedly free press during his Friday press conference. Kennedy’s announcement that he will remove his name as a candidate for president in swing states and endorses Donald Trump brought cheers from Trump supporters and derision from Democrat die-hards.
But what does the alliance between Trump and Kennedy mean to the future of the Republican platform? Properly understood, nothing.
Friday’s speech was not about the policies of the Grand Old Party any more than it was about whether Kennedy’s old-school Democrat belief system remained intact. As Kennedy acknowledged, he had been “a ferocious critic of many of the policies during [Trump’s] first administration,” and the two will “continue to have very serious differences” about “issues and approaches.”
Yet an alliance will allow him and Trump to “work[] together on the existential issues upon which we are in concordance,” Kennedy explained during his press conference last week. The key “existential issues” Kennedy identified, and the hopes he professed for our country, transcend partisan politics and harken to the days of our founding.
Kennedy identified institutional corruption of both the government and the press, manifesting itself in “government propaganda,” a “resort to censorship and media control, and the weaponization of the federal agencies” as foundational threats to the country. Lawfare at the voting booth, against both Trump and Kennedy, further built the former Democrat’s case for exiting the race.
These complaints are not Republican or Democrat: indeed, every American should be horrified by the weaponization of our government and the censorship-industrial complex that converted the press from a check on our government to a co-conspirator.
Whether peddling the Russia collusion hoax against Trump, censoring information about Covid-19 vaccines, or hiding Joe Biden’s mental incapacity from the public, the press’s complicity in interfering in both elections and governance leaves Americans with one choice: an electoral revolt against the party responsible for the government’s corruption. As Kennedy put it: “When a U.S. president colludes with or outright coerces media companies to censor political speech, it’s an attack on our most sacred right of free expression, and that’s the very right upon which all of our other constitutional rights rest.”
“Securing our border,” “protecting freedom of speech,” and “getting the U.S. intelligence agencies out of the business of propagandizing and censoring and surveilling Americans and interfering with our elections”—all pressing issues Kennedy identified as reasons for his decision to suspend his campaign and endorse Trump—aren’t matters of partisanship or policy, but a matter of survival for our constitutional republic.
What of Ukraine, ending the forever wars, and fighting “big pharma, big tech, big ag, and big money,” as well as ending the childhood disease epidemic? Kennedy also identified those as areas of agreement with Trump.
For some of these issues, such as ending the war in Ukraine, Trump has made his position clear, prevailing with his view in the Republican primary. Trump’s alliance with Kennedy, then, changes nothing about these. On other issues, Republicans will need to assess any forthcoming proposals—just as Kennedy and his supporters will. There well may be fierce disagreements.
Here, though, is the key to why the alliance matters: No one, Democrat, Republican, or Independent, can properly assess a proposed policy without transparency and honest reporting. Nor can a country founded on liberty survive if the government commandeers the press to brainwash its citizenry.
There will be plenty of time for Republicans to fight over policies.
Now is the time to win on the fundamentals. Just as Kennedy’s decision
to limit his campaign and support Trump does not represent an
abandonment by the lifelong Democrat of his policy positions,
Republicans welcoming Kennedy and his supporters to the revolution
aren’t sacrificing their core conservative convictions either. [SOURCE]
JD Vance high school leaks just keep dropping
— Joe Norman (@normonics) August 17, 2024
pic.twitter.com/Nw7chLr8l8
🚨 WOW! Kamala Harris is literally threatening to unilaterally CONFISCATE citizens’ and businesses’ private property
— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) August 17, 2024
“I will snatch their patent, so that we [the government] will take over. Yes we can do that!”
THIS IS WHAT LITERAL DICTATORS DO.
Comrade Kamala wants to turn… pic.twitter.com/fWOmXn4Teg
WOAH.
— Ryan Fournier (@RyanAFournier) August 12, 2024
WHY did Wikipedia SCRUB JD Vance's medals from his prior service with the Marine Corps? pic.twitter.com/tZ1tdK1dCI
Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign has been caught editing various outlets’ headlines to appear in Americans’ Google searches as sponsored ads, according to an Axios report.
Over the last ten days, the Harris campaign has edited the headlines and descriptions of almost a dozen outlets’ articles found through Google search advertisements to appear as search ads from the Harris campaign, according to Axios. Several of those outlets, including CNN, USA Today and NPR, told the outlet they were not aware that their articles were being manipulated for Harris campaign ads.
“While we understand why an organization might wish to align itself with the Guardian’s trusted brand, we need to ensure it is being used appropriately and with our permission. We’ll be reaching out to Google for more information about this practice,” a Guardian spokesperson told the outlet.
Other outlets used in the ads include The Independent UK, AP, PBS, CBS News, Time and WDAY Radio, a local North Dakota radio station, Axios reported.
One example of the Harris’ ads links to an NPR article, edited to have the headline read “Harris Will Lower Health Costs,” Axios reported. The ad then has the description, “Kamala Harris will lower the cost of high-quality affordable health care,” the outlet found.
Though the ads are sponsored by the campaign and indicate such, Axios noted that it is not at first clear that the text promoting the article is written by Harris’ team. The Harris campaign’s latest gimmick does not violate Google’s policies, according to Axios, and the search engine believes its “sponsored” tag provides enough context for a viewer.
The campaign is trying to use the ads attached to various news stories as a way to give voters “more context,” a source familiar with Harris campaign’s ads team told the outlet.
The Harris campaign’s latest stunt could add to the growing number of questions the vice president has yet to answer. Since launching her campaign three weeks ago, Harris has yet to do a sit-down interview or a press conference. In an attempt to highlight Harris’ media avoidance and policies, the Trump campaign plans to have Senator J.D. Vance trail the vice president on the campaign trail, insiders previously told the Daily Caller. (RELATED: ‘Dam Is Going To Break’: Trump Insiders Forecast Counterattack Against Kamala’s Basement Campaign)
“To highlight that, Senator Vance and President Trump are showing up where Kamala Harris is not,” a campaign spokesperson previously told the Caller.
“Senator Vance is doing the same by going to the same
places that Kamala Harris is going but refusing to take questions.
Anyone can show up in a state and read off of a script, off a
teleprompter, and then leave 20 minutes later, that’s exactly what Joe
Biden was doing, and it didn’t work for him. We’re not going to let it
work,” the spokesperson continued. [SOURCE]
