Excerpted from: FCC Commissioner Bashes Meta for Censoring Politically Devastating Kamala Harris News

TOM OLOHAN

OCTOBER 23, 2024

It’s late October in an election year and Meta is once again throttling a story that embarrasses Democrats, prompting Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr to sound the alarm on Fox Business.

Carr condemned the social media giant during the Oct. 22 edition of Mornings with Maria Bartiromo. Carr said that Facebook had censored a post about the Biden-Harris administration’s incredible failed internet rollout. “Here is the information about Vice President Kamala Harris' record that both Facebook and the administration itself don't want the American people to know,” Carr said. “In 2021, Vice President Harris agreed to lead the administration's signature $42 billion plan to connect millions of Americans to the internet. Back then, Vice President Harris said we can get the job done today.”

Carr noted that despite this massive expense, Harris had absolutely nothing to show for her efforts. He specifically said, “Well, flash forward to today, it's been now 1,072 days, since she took the helm of this program and as you noted, not one single American has been connected to the internet, not single shovel's worth of dirt has been turned and calling that out resulted in a now false and debunked fact check but that's the information that the American people should be having access to right now.”

For context, Facebook placed a fact check interstitial over a photo of an X post going after Harris for a serious failure. After the passage of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in 2021, the Biden-Harris administration presided over a $42 billion rural broadband program to give high-speed internet to millions. 

Carr recently published a Wall Street Journal article noting that Harris personally “agreed to lead” the program. Carr noted that not only had no Americans been connected so far but that the administration did not expect anything to be built at all until 2025 or 2026. 

Carr also wrote that politics took precedence over serving Americans without internet. Carr wrote that the program “has adopted regulations that include diversity, equity and inclusion requirements, climate-change rules, price controls, preferences for union labor, and schemes that favor government-run networks.”

During the interview, Fox Business Host Maria Bartiromo mentioned the shocking fact that Meta’s fact-check depended on the word of the same administration that had failed to connect any Americans. Carr also emphasized this in an Oct. 19 post on X, writing, “The fact checker’s only sources are Biden-Harris officials.”

This is not the first time that Meta has interfered in an election. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently confessed in writing that Facebook and Instagram bowed to government pressure and  wrongly censored the Hunter Biden laptop story and “COVID-19 content.” 

In his post on X, Carr reminded Zuckerberg of Facebook’s past on this issue, pointedly writing, “I thought Zuckerberg promised Congress that it had stopped censoring posts at the behest of the Biden-Harris Administration.”

Facebook relied on a fact check article from USA Today to support its censorship. According to Facebook, users fail to click through fact-check interstitials 95% of the time.