By: Jared Evan
In a letter to Attorney General William Barr, Florida Rep Gaetz alleged that Zuckerberg made false statements to Congress about Facebook’s content moderation during two hearings two years ago.
The letter said: “On both occasions, members of Congress asked Mr. Zuckerberg about allegations that Facebook censored and suppressed content supportive of President Donald Trump and other conservatives. In his responses, Mr. Zuckerberg repeatedly and categorically denied any bias against conservative speech, persons, policies, or politics Mr. Zuckerberg also dismissed the suggestion that Facebook exercises any form of editorial manipulation.”
The congressman continued: “As a member of this body, I question Mr. Zuckerberg’s veracity, and challenge his willingness to cooperate with our oversight authority, diverting congressional resources during time-sensitive investigations, and materially impeding our work,” Gaetz, a House Judiciary Committee member, wrote. “Such misrepresentations are not only unfair; they are potentially illegal and fraudulent.”
Gatz’s ammunition to this latest accusation against Facebook and Zuckerberg is a series of recent investigations from Project Veritas. He mentioned in the letter to Barr: “recent reports from Project Veritas, featuring whistleblowers who worked as Facebook’s ‘content moderators,’ have shown ample evidence” of Facebook’s purported “bias and manipulation” against conservative speech.
Left leaning outlets like Business Insider were quick to besmirch Project Veritas and its founder. James O’keefe. Business Insider sloppily and biasedly wrote “Project Veritas is a right-wing activist group that frequently traffics in misinformation and propaganda”, in an effort to minimalize the impact of Gatz requests to AG Barr.
It is true that Project Veritas investigates subjects that conservatives would be interested in exposing, such as Planned Parenthood, Bernie Sander’s staff members and Facebook bias. However, not a single investigation has ever been proven to be fraudulent. O’Keefe carefully crafts investigations, staffs, professional actors and sends them out undercover equip with recording devices to capture evidence on camera and audio. The goal is do destroy the credibility of Project Veritas, albeit with no proof.
Gatz expanded on the Project Veritas expose in the letter: “according to the Veritas report and undercover footage, the adjudicators were outspoken about their political bias against Republicans, and actively chose to eliminate otherwise-allowable content from the platform and from public view simply due to its political orientation,” Gaetz wrote to Barr.
“This arbitrary and capricious behavior is not done in good faith and falls outside of the express intent of §230 of the Communications Decency Act, which affords Facebook liability protection as long as the platform moderates’ content in ‘good faith.’”
It is yet to se seen if Barr will take any action and look further into Gatz requests. This topic is nothing new to The Jewish voice, which has been tenaciously reporting on Facebook and social media censorship, and shadow banning since 2018.
In 2018, the first major banning of a conservative figure took place.
TJV reported in 2018 :
The permanent suspension of flamboyant and controversial, conservative political speaker, writer, and former Breitbart technology editor Milo Yiannopoulos from Twitter was what many consider a watershed moment in social media censorship. Yiannopoulos had several million followers on Twitter and had used social media to build his name and career to his advantage. His local appearances at college campus bring giant protests from hard left protestors as evidently free speech is no longer acceptable at universities; but it was not any radical political viewpoints that got him banned from Twitter, no it was simply insulting actress and comedian Leslie Jones.
It is at this point; the floodgates were opened. Immensely popular radio host and owner of popular alternative news site Alex Jones was methodically removed from all social media. In 2018, YouTube began suspending his account, by mid-2019, Alex Jones was 100% removed from social media. The same happened to Jewish fire-brand right-wing personality Laura Loomer, removed from all social media. There have been countless others, outright banned. The more edgy sometimes “conspiratorial” social media personalities are outright banned, while something sneaky frequently happens to more straight forward news entities that lean conservative: the “shadowban”
Shadow-banning is a clever trick designed to drive traffic and impact down of conservative outlets. Breitbart, one of the most popular news sites in America, was an early victim of shadow-banning. When you are “shadowbanned” on Facebook, the induvial user who may be following Breitbart, will not see any updates from the outlet on their news feed. The user has to go directly to their favorite news outlets Facebook page to see their updates. Without knowing this, one can simply forget outlets like The Jewish Voice, Daily Caller or Breitbart still exist, as the updates to do not show up when one logs into Facebook. This is a sneaky way to cause damage to media outlets not favored by Silicon Valley.
The Jewish voice can attest to the impact of “shadowbanning”. Since 2018, TJV has seen our traffic coming from Facebook essentially vanish. Posts from the Jewish Voice, according to Facebook statistics, which one receives when running a Facebook page for a company; we witnessed the clear pattern of our posts being shadowbanned. The average post went from on average 6-7 thousand viewers seeing the post, to on average 200-300 people per post. TJV did not lose large amounts of followers, but our exposure has dropped like a rock. Many people who follow The Jewish Voice, have pointed out to us, they no longer see us on their Facebook News Feed. Our Twitter interaction has slowed to a crawl as well.
“ I hope Mr Barr takes this seriously and looks into not only the outright banning of conservative media figures and outlets, but the shadow banning as well, which is sneaky, unfair and negatively effects our business” The Jewish Voice publisher David Benhooren told me after learning about Gaetz efforts.
