New member of the Daily Wire, Candace Owens, announced that she has filed a lawsuit against Facebook fact-checkers Lead Stories and USA Today for censoring American’s free speech.
“Yes, Mr. Zuckerberg, you’ve been trying to hide behind your fact-checkers. Now it’s time to put your sleazy little fact-checkers through discovery and figure out what their relationship is with Facebook, who has given them this power to censor Americans and why they are contributing to this mass undoing of our society,” Owens said on Instagram live Thursday. “It is not up to Facebook fact-checkers to determine what information we take in, or to pretend that our information is dangerous.”
Owens has hinted at the possibility of a lawsuit ever since her opinions began getting fact-checked, which led to her Facebook page being demonetized in August.
During her announcement on Instagram, which is also owned by Facebook, Owens said she could imagine this type of treatment under Soviet Union dictator Joseph Stalin or Venezuelan socialist Hugo Chavez. Not in 21st Century America. “I am doing this for all of us. Once we establish precedent, when Facebook comes and they fact-check you, you will have something to come behind. This cannot be allowed in this country.”
“Even if you told the truth, and you shared a doctor’s opinion, if it ran contrary to their doctor’s opinion, you were fact-checked and you were called untrue,” Owens said in a separate video posted to Facebook. In the Facebook video, she referred to Facebook’s policy about COVID-19 “misinformation” that has led to a purge of content that contradicts the left’s alarmist narrative about COVID-19 .
Facebook’s fact-checkers are all part of the liberal Poynter Institute's International Fact Checking Network (IFCN), which received $1.3 million from liberal billionaires George Soros and Pierre Omidyar. Facebook’s program has 10 U.S.-based fact-checkers. With the exception of Check Your Fact, eight of these organizations defend the left. One other is a NeverTrump publication. Lead Stories, which performs 76 percent of the fact-checks on Facebook, is run by eight former CNN alumni. USA Today, reportedly used college interns to help with its fact-checking.
“These are human-beings, these are activists, these are liberals that are behind the scenes censoring the way that we communicate with one another if it goes against a type of thought that they endorse themselves,” Owens said about Facebook’s fact-checkers during her Instagram announcement.
As outlined in Facebook’s Journalism Project, the platform suppresses information once it is fact-checked: “Once we have a rating from a fact-checking partner, we take action by ensuring that fewer people see that misinformation by surfacing fact-check articles to users across our platforms and showing labels on top of false stories.”
Owens has set up a website to help garner donations for her legal fund called FactCheckZuck.com. “My legal bills are about to be super crazy,” Owens said. “It’s already been very expensive and we’ve just gotten to the point of filing, but it’s worth it. These are the types of fights that conservatives have to take.”
Conservatives are under attack. Contact Facebook via phone at (650) 308-7300 or (650) 543-4800, or by mail to 1601 Willow Road Menlo Park, CA 94025, and demand that the platform provide transparency: Companies need to design open systems so that they can be held accountable, while giving weight to privacy concerns. If you have been censored, contact us at the Media Research Center contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
