Social-media behemoth Facebook is again apparently censoring conservative voices on its platform. Conservative news site The National Pulse is reporting that the social-media platform has added a “fact check” to their story about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggesting that Communist China would prefer a Biden presidency, labeling the story “partly false.”
However, the “independent fact checker” that Facebook used to quash the story is allegedly the leftist fact-check site Lead Stories, which recently partnered with Chinese data-collection tool TikTok, which in turn is owned by ByteDance, whose founder Zhang Yiming recently promised that ByteDance would “further deepen cooperation” with the communist government of China.
On August 6, President Trump signed an executive order that essentially bans American citizens and corporations from doing business with ByteDance and, by extension, TikTok. The order will take effect 45 days from its issuance.
“Ostensibly, the job of Facebook fact checkers is to highlight fake news. Not to challenge the editorial positions or news direction of reputable Western news organizations. Lead Stories is a group of Democratic donors and Chinese Communist Party collaborators demanding Western news sites bow to their editorial preferences. We never will,” said National Pulse Editor-in-Chief Raheem Kassam.
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According to Lead Stories, The National Pulse falsely claimed that Speaker Pelosi “confirmed” the findings of a recent National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC) report, which claims that the Communist Chinese government would rather Joe Biden win the presidency than Donald Trump, and that the Russians would prefer Trump. Instead, Lead Stories claims, Pelosi only “quoted” from the report.
According to Lead Stories, the story was false because “Pelosi was quoting Trump administration’s National Counterintelligence and Security Center intelligence report that concluded Russia favored Trump, while China favored Biden.”
What Pelosi actually said was, “The Chinese .. what the [NCSC] said is China would prefer [Biden]. Whether they do, that’s their conclusion. That they would prefer Joe Biden.”
You can argue whether or not that is a “confirmation” of the NCSC’s report, but it’s definitely not a “quote” from the report, so the semantics game that Lead Stories is playing could reasonably be turned against them. Pelosi may have been referencing the report, but she did not quote from it. Regardless, it’s rather thin evidence on which to claim that The National Pulse’s story is “partly false.”
Add to that the fact that Lead Stories may not be the impartial fact checker it claims to be.
From The National Pulse: “Lead Stories staff, including Editor-in-Chief and co-founder Alan Duke, have extensive histories of working for establishment media outlet CNN. Collectively, employees at [Lead Stories] have over 120 years of experience working for the left-wing outlet (CNN) which has extensive links to the Chinese Communist Party.”
The National Pulse goes on to cite one of its own stories which reports that CNN, the New York Times, Financial Times, Rueters, and Bloomberg regularly cooperate with the Global Business Journalism School, a Chinese organization that looks to “apply Marxist theory” to journalism.
In advance of the 2020 election, Facebook has definitely ramped up its efforts to remove so-called fake news from their platform. As worthy as that goal sounds, the partners the social-media giant chooses all have agendas of their own, even — and perhaps, especially — the fact checkers it employs. Using Lead Stories as an independent fact checker and hiring former DNC staffers such as Liz Bourgeois as a communications director show that the platform has a clear left-wing bias. And that goes against its founder Mark Zuckerberg’s claim that he doesn’t want the company to be an “arbiter of truth.”
It should not be Facebook’s job to qualify news or opinions as true or false. At its best, Facebook is a place akin to a town square, where friends and family can connect and share personal stories and anecdotes about their lives with one another. However, what it’s becoming is the new Pravda, a place where only “acceptable” thought is allowed.
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James Murphy is a freelance journalist who writes on a variety of subjects. He can be reached at [email protected].
