Today, only days after Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis signed a new bill that will crack down on the censorship tactics used by Facebook and other social media platforms, Politico announced that Facebook will no longer take down posts claiming that Covid-19 was man-made or manufactured.
Miami Herald – The legislation, which DeSantis touted as the first of its kind in the nation, would, among other things, make it illegal for large technology companies to remove candidates for office from their platforms in the run-up to an election. It would also make it easier for Florida’s attorney general and individuals to sue “big tech.”
“These platforms have become our public square,” DeSantis said at a lectern with a sign that read “STOP Big Tech Censorship,” noting that “big tech oligarchs” have censored debates about the pandemic and policies that officials put in place to contain the deadly virus, such as lockdowns.
“Silicon Valley is acting as a council of censors; they cancel people when mobs come after somebody. They will pull them down,” he said.
In a speech in Texas in January, DeSantis called fighting conservative censorship online “probably the most important legislative issue that we’re going to have to get right this year and next year.”
From Politico – A narrative in flux: Facebook’s policy tweak arrives as support surges in Washington for a fuller investigation into the origins of Covid-19 after the Wall Street Journal reported that three scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were hospitalized in late 2019 with symptoms consistent with the virus. The findings have reinvigorated the debate about the so-called Wuhan lab-leak theory, once dismissed as a fringe conspiracy theory.
Americans should be asking why leftist, third-party “fact-checkers” been allowed to control the news cycle and unfairly impugn conservative publishers on Facebook for so long?
In 2016, only 9 days before the election, without warning, we received a notification from Facebook that our 100 Percent Fed Up Facebook page with almost 1 million followers (we currently have almost 1.7 million followers) was UNPUBLISHED and would not be republished.
After Breitbart News wrote about Facebook shutting down our page for no reason, Facebook reinstated it. Their only explanation was that “This was a mistake.”
So far, Facebook has not shut down our popular page before the November election. Instead, like many conservative Facebook pages, we’ve been hit with multiple, untrue fact-check violations by leftist, third-party “fact-checkers.” For the past 3 months, traffic on our Facebook page has been drastically reduced. Is it a coincidence that traffic on our pro-Trump, 100 Percent Fed Up Facebook page has been reduced by approximately 90% only months before a critical election?
“False news” or “misinformation” violations by third-party fact-checkers hired by Facebook, gives them the green-light to “demote,” or hide posts on their platform, including valuable information that is of interest to Americans about the upcoming election. Much of the news we publish is news the Democrat Party’s mainstream media refuses to publish or news the dishonest media intentionally distorts to paint a favorable picture of Democratic Party candidates.
On Oct. 11, 100 Percent Fed Up received two “false news” violations for the same article on Facebook.
The violations were from the far-left activist “fact-checking” group, Science Feedback, related to an article we wrote about a Chinese virologist who fled China out of fear for her safety after claiming that COVID-19 was manufactured in China’s only biosafety level-4 super laboratory. The laboratory where she worked is only a few miles away from the Wuhan wet market, where Chinese officials claim the coronavirus emanated. Human infectious diseases are researched in the lab, including the novel coronavirus.
The second paragraph in our article states: “While there is not yet clear evidence that the coronavirus originated in the lab where it was being studied, it has not been ruled out as the origin of the global COVID-19 pandemic,”
Science Feedback responded to our article that shared the top Chinese virologist’s claim: “The virus causing COVID-19 most likely evolved in natural wildlife populations before spreading to humans.
“Most likely?” When someone uses the term “most likely,” it denotes that they are not in possession of factual evidence but instead, have a strong suspicion that what they are saying is true. From the Merriam Webster dictionary:
Definition of most likely: more likely than not: probably
It will most likely rain tomorrow.
False News and “Most likely” is not the same thing—and yet, when we appealed the violation with Science Feeback, the activist “fact-checker” hired by Facebook denied our appeal, telling us that they would not remove the violation from our page, knowing full well that their violation would keep the news we publish hidden from our 1.7 million followers until after the election.
Here’s a screenshot of the “False information” violation we received on Facebook:
On their website, Science Feedback asks for donations to fuel their censorship machine.
A closer look at their top donors explains why we refer to them as a far-left activist group.
Science Feedback’s top individual donor is Eric Michelman.
Eric Michelman, a climate change activist, noted Democratic donor and left-of-center activist. Influence Watch identifies Michelman as a computer scientist and angel investor who is also a left-of-center activist. Michelman is the creator of the Climate Change Education Project and the More Than Scientists organization and project.
Michelman is also a noted Democratic donor, donating money to the Presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Michelman is also a climate change activist, founding a climate change advocacy organization and publicly supporting a carbon tax.
Another top individual donor to Science Feedback is the Reiss Foundation.
Here are just a few of the anti-Trump, pro-Obama, trans rights, defund the police, and anti-law enforcement topics that are pushed on the Reiss Foundation website:
AntiTrump trans:
https://twitter.com/ReissaFound/status/1283590943560667139?s=20
End school policing – trans tweet:
https://twitter.com/ReissaFound/status/1283560742248218624?s=20
Trans rights for kids:
https://twitter.com/JBAforYouth/status/1280967392495951872?s=20
Defund the police:
https://twitter.com/ReissaFound/status/1280625170726690816?s=20
https://twitter.com/ReissaFound/status/1276972365151420419?s=20
Support for Barack Obama:
https://twitter.com/ReissaFound/status/1268983448389275648?s=20
Climate Feedback, a division of Science Feedback, regularly assesses violations to publishers who dare to claim that climate change is not man-made. Recently, Climate Change assessed a fact check violation against The Daily Caller for not naming climate change as the source of CA fires.
From Climate Feedback: Three scientists analyzed the article and estimated its overall scientific credibility to be ‘low.’
A majority of reviewers tagged the article as Biased, Clickbait headline, Misleading.
Could their fact-check violation have anything to do with their top individual donor, Eric Michelman’s views on fires started by climate change that he posted on Facebook three years ago?
In their fact check claim article, Climate Feedback calls The Daily Caller out for not including information related to man-man climate change:
In addition to forest management practices, human-caused climate change is a key driver of wildfire severity[2,5,6]. Specifically, climate change is causing warmer and drier conditions that increase the amount of dry vegetative fuel and total area burned during wildfires in the western US. As described in Abatzoglou and Williams (2016), “human-caused climate change caused over half of the documented increases in fuel aridity since the 1970s and doubled the cumulative forest fire area since 1984” (see figure below)[5].
In other words, agree with the science we push, or we’ll defame your news organization and label your articles as “fake news.”
Here’s the best part—the Daily Caller is also a fact-checker hired by Facebook. It should be noted; the Daily Caller is the only fact-checking organization that is not left of center.
1.7 million Facebook users have “liked” our 100 Percent Fed Up Facebook page, indicating to Facebook that they would like to see our content in their newsfeed. Third-party “fact-checkers” hired by Facebook have been given the ability to decide whether or not Facebook users can see our content, and that should scare the hell out of every American that relies on Facebook for their news.
