The mostly anti-conservative censors at Facebook tagged several Republican candidates over the past decade, removing ads and posts at least 39 times, according to a new deep-dive investigation into the social media platform and its partners.
Politicians, including former President Donald Trump, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), and even independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., saw their content censored by the online giant that has repeatedly promised to protect free speech.
“If Facebook, the company, had a personal Facebook profile, its ‘relationship status’ with free speech would say, ‘It’s complicated.’ The platform, however, has consistently courted election interference efforts,” read the report from MRC Free Speech America.
“The platform’s record of election-interfering censorship began in 2012, reached a crescendo in 2020,” the Media Research Center said. MRC partners with Secrets for the weekly Liberal Media Scream feature.
The report dated the censorship back to a 2012 effort to remind voters of the Obama administration’s Benghazi, Libya, scandal.
More recently, censors interfered with “trending stories” during the 2016 election, undervaluing or removing reports on the Conservative Political Action Conference and candidates such as Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT).
While the report shared with Secrets indicated that the censorship “begun fading somewhat in the early stages of the 2024 electoral cycle,” Facebook/Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg’s team has been downgrading political news by requiring users to opt in to receive it.
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“In February, Meta announced that Instagram and Threads (a new social media platform owned by Meta) will no longer recommend political content by default, but users can opt in to having such content promoted to them,” the report noted.
“Although the move sounds harmless, it makes it more difficult for those who produce political content to grow their page and for more viewers to decide for themselves whether or not they want to follow that content. The platform has also censored GOP presidential candidate Larry Elder, Democrat-turned-Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein,” added the report compiled by Dan Schneider, the vice president of MRC Free Speech America.
