By: Fern Sidman
The topic of censorship and how it is arbitrarily employed by the Silicon Valley big tech firms seems to be dominating headlines once again during this tempestuous election season.
Early Friday, it was reported that former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, had his Twitter account permanently closed by the social media giant because he used the word “beheading” in what appears to be in a non-hostile manner.
On Thursday, politically conservative firebrand, Candace Owens announced that she was courageously taking on Facebook in a lawsuit over their efforts to silence her through the unfair practice of scrutinizing and censoring her social media posts. The target of Ms. Owens’ legal battle are the third-party fact checkers who are on Facebook’s staff.
In a candid video that was posted to her Twitter account, Owens said, “It is time to fact-check the fact-checkers. I’m going to put these suckers through discovery and figure out what the relationship is that they have with Facebook.”
According to a Fox News report, Owens offered an illustration of the kind of censorship modalities that are utilized by Facebook that she believes crosses the invisible line in the sand.
“Quite literally a doctor gave his opinion about Covid-19, which I shared, and Facebook issued a strike on my account because they said only information that they agree with about COVID-19 … was acceptable,” she said.
She said her Facebook page was demonetized as a result, meaning she could no longer use the page for income purposes, as was reported by Fox News.
She added that, “I decided I was not going to give up and sit down. The fact-checkers. .. they are activists for the left that shut down your speech if they don’t like it.”
Ms. Owens has also retained some legal muscle to help her launch these potentially groundbreaking legal proceedings. According to the Fox News report, Ms. Owens has hired a pair of attorneys who will be part of her legal team. One such attorney is Todd McMurtry, who represented Nick Sandmann, the Kentucky student from Covington Catholic High School.
As Ms. Owens was critiquing the presidential election, Ms. Owens also took note of the fact that others have been the targets of censorship on social media, including President Trump. According to the Fox News report, the president had several tweets flagged for allegedly posting what the fact checkers judged as “baseless claims and misleading information.”
Included in the list of defendants that are in Ms. Owens’ suit are USA Today and Lead Stories Fact Checker, as was reported by Fox News. Both are third-party, fact-checking partners for Facebook.
In response to what they perceived as disinformation campaigns flooding social media platforms during the 2016 presidential race, Facebook launched its third-party, fact-checking program, according to the Fox News report. The aforementioned defendants enlisted for the program to verify content posted to Facebook and Instagram, and identify whether it is false or misleading, according to the cable network.
The fact-checkers apply ratings to content that range from “false,” “altered” and “missing context.” When such ratings are applied, Facebook may either reduce its distribution or add labels to notify users about additional reporting elsewhere, according to the Fox News report.
Fox also reported that other actions include alerting users with a pop-up notice so they can decide if they want to read the content for themsel
