The Biden for President campaign struck out again.
Having failed to persuade Fox News not to run President Trump’s advertisement about the Biden-Burisma influence-peddling scandal, the campaign’s Censorship Directorate thought Facebook might, like CNN, kill the ad.
Facebook’s answer: Forget it.
So credit where credit is due. Unlike CNN, Facebook did not submit to Biden’s ridiculous request to block criticism of Biden and his faltering campaign.
Why Deep-six the Ad?
Biden wants the ad killed because it summarized in 30 seconds the growing Biden-Burisma scandal that threatens to get bigger if the Democrats attempt to impeach President Trump.
In 2014, a month after Biden visited Ukraine, his son Hunter landed on the board of Burisma Holdings, an energy company in the country. Biden fils, a drug addict booted from the Navy for using cocaine, was not qualified for the position. On March 16, the former vice president threatened Ukraine with losing $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees if it did not fire the prosecutor who was investigating Burisma. Biden bragged that he forced Ukraine to pink-slip that prosecutor. His son pocketed a fortune, some $50,000 a month.
Voiceover: Joe Biden promised Ukraine $1 billion if they fired the prosecutor investigating his son’s company.
Biden: “If the prosecutor’s not fired, you’re not gettin’ the money. Well son of bitch, he got fired.”
Voiceover: But when President Trump asks Ukraine to investigate corruption, the Democrats want to impeach him and their media lapdogs fall in line. They lost the election. And now they want to steal this one.
Thus did Biden’s campaign chief, Greg Schultz, the New York Times reported yesterday, tell Facebook it must block the ad because it “spreads false, definitively debunked conspiracy theories regarding Vice President Joe Biden.”
Whatever Biden’s claims, the advertisement is accurate, which explains why the Biden campaign wants the networks and social-media companies to kill it. CNN complied. Fox News didn’t.
Neither did Facebook.
Facebook’s Big No
The Times reported that Facebook told the Biden campaign, in so many words, to buzz off.
“Our approach is grounded in Facebook’s fundamental belief in free expression, respect for the democratic process, and the belief that, in mature democracies with a free press, political speech is already arguably the most scrutinized speech there is,” the company’s head of global elections policy, Katie Harbath, wrote to Biden’s people.
Unsurprisingly, Biden isn’t the only candidate worried that Trump will use the platform to defeat his Democrat opponent in 2020.
Senator Elizabeth Warren, now tied with Biden in Real Clear Politics polling averages that measure support for 2020 candidates, actually claimed that Facebook was partly responsible for Trump’s shocking defeat of the anointed one in 2016.
Warren is pounding the war drums on Twitter over a Trump campaign ad that nails the Democrats on gun rights.
“Facebook already helped elect Donald Trump once because they were asleep at the wheel while Russia attacked our democracy — allowing fake, foreign accounts to run ad campaigns to influence our elections,” the Indian imposter wrote. “There’s no indication that [Mark] Zuckerberg or Facebook executives have come to terms with the role their unpreparedness played in that successful attack, nor have they shown that they understand what needs to be done to prevent another attack in the 2020 election.”
In other words, Warren fears Trump’s cavalry division of voters might see those ads, vote for him, and stop her scalping raid on the American people. Warren often speaks with a forked tongue, and just might fear the Great White Father in the White House will open the flap on her teepee of lies.
Other Social Media
Facebook isn’t alone among social media in refusing Biden’s request. YouTube and Twitter both told the Times that the ad does not violate their policies.
Biden’s people, of course do not agree.
“T.J. Ducklo, a spokesman for Mr. Biden, wrote in an email that ‘Donald Trump has demonstrated he will continue to subvert our democratic institutions for his own personal gain, but his shortcomings are no excuse for companies like Facebook to refuse to do the right thing,’” the Times reported.
Biden and Warren are lawyers, yet both have asked the media to silence political speech they claim is “objectively false.”
In fact, again, Trump’s ad is objectively true.
That invites the obvious observation that Biden, Warren, and their spear carriers, not Trump, are the real threats to “democratic institutions.”
Image: zimmytws via iStock / Getty Images Plus
