October 16, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) — This month, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has been complaining that Facebook is willing to publish ads for President Donald Trump’s re-election even if they make “untrue” claims. To further that crusade, this week, she pulled a stunt that has to have a few donors to her presidential campaign asking for refunds.
Facebook says any claims “made directly by a politician on their Page, in an ad or on their website” are “considered direct speech and ineligible for our third-party fact checking program.” The social giant has much to answer for in how it treats the speech of anyone not running for the nation’s highest office, but this rule is perfectly sensible, and it should be how Facebook handles all political speech. Unfettered competition between two opposing sides is more conducive to discerning actual truth than having a third party with its own biases hand down decrees on what the “official” truth is.
Angry that voters can still see the president of the United States on social media, Warren announced over the weekend that her campaign “intentionally made a Facebook ad with false claims and submitted it to Facebook’s ad platform to see if it’d be approved. It got approved quickly and the ad is now running on Facebook.” It reads:
Breaking news: Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook just endorsed Donald Trump for re-election. You’re probably shocked, and you might be thinking, ‘how could this possibly be true?’ Well it’s not. (Sorry.) But what Zuckerberg *has* done is given Donald Trump free rein to lie on his platform — and then to pay Facebook gobs of money to push out their lies to American voters.
No, you haven’t gone crazy: Team Warren created a deliberately fake ad to “prove” that Facebook doesn’t fact-check ads that Facebook has already said it doesn’t fact-check. They thought this was a smart and worthwhile use of campaign dollars. “Intellectual powerhouse of the Democratic party,” indeed.
And why is it vitally important that Facebook censor Trump ads that fail to meet the approval of Trump’s opponents? It’s to “protect democracy,” of course:
Once again, we’re seeing Facebook throw its hands up to battling misinformation in the political discourse, because when profit comes up against protecting democracy, Facebook chooses profit.
— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) October 12, 2019
Please. Warren and her ilk don’t want to protect democracy; they want to return to the good old days where information on national politics was dominated by a handful of news networks that all slanted stories to Democrats’ liking. Every time a dissenting form of media has risen, the Left has tried to crush it — the Fairness Doctrine in response to talk radio, campaign finance “reform” in response to independent groups financing political speech, so-called “fact-checkers” in response to new media competing with the MSM old guard. Today it’s Big Tech suppression in response to conservatives spreading their message on social media.
As regular readers know, LifeSiteNews and other publications have extensively covered Facebook’s and other companies’ discrimination against truthful, non-violent, non-hateful conservative voices through a litany of means, from algorithms to “Community Standards.” Yet because Mark Zuckerberg occasionally makes meaningless gestures to feign impartiality, like toothless “audits” and occasional meetings with Republicans, Warren pretends he’s part of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy.
Why? If I was more conspiratorially inclined, I might wonder if Warren was deliberately feeding the “right-wing Facebook” myth to throw voters off the scent of the company’s left-wing bias. But knowledge of the leftist mind suggests a siLmpler answer: whatever you give them is never enough.
