Facebook/Meta is jumping back into the election misinformation campaign, two years after one of the most catastrophic choices that media outlets and social media platforms have ever made.
That is to say, censoring the New York Post’s story about a laptop abandoned by Hunter Biden, the son of then-presidential candidate Joe Biden. National media outlets that actively promoted the censorship by Twitter and Facebook still have not apologized for that action. They are happy with what they did, for they know that honesty could have assisted the reelection of Donald Trump.
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No one has been fired, and there has been no transparency into how this media malpractice occurred. The most contrition the public received was a tepid apology from Jack Dorsey, the former head of Twitter. Now, the same Facebook representative who announced that the influential media platform would be purposefully limiting the reach and spread of the story has announced that he and his company will once again be stepping in to stop what they deem misinformation campaigns from Russia and China.
Andy Stone, who leads communications for Meta and is a former staffer for Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), as well as the Democratic National Congressional Committee, tweeted on Oct. 14 of 2020, “While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want be clear that this story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform.” Stone never followed up once the story was found to be accurate and that the FBI was examining the laptop.
Stone never gave an apology or an explanation. There was no follow-up from Facebook itself. The damage was already done. A former Democratic Party operative put his company’s finger on the scale of the election and, for the most part, journalists all remained silent about it. Would this story have swayed the election over to Trump? Probably not, but that point is largely irrelevant.
Stone has now announced new efforts by the company to “disrupt” Chinese influence campaigns in the Unuted States ahead of the midterm elections. Stone linked to a page on Meta titled “Removing Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior From China and Russia.” It was written by Ben Nimmo, Meta’s global threat intelligence lead, and David Agranovich, the director of threat disruption for Meta. Agranovich is a former analyst for the Department of Defense, as well as a former director of intelligence for the NSA and White House.
Disrupting hostile foreign online disinformation efforts is a noble cause. The problem is that Meta has proven to have a clear conflict of interest on these matters. Meta owes increased transparency to the voting public and its users when it comes to relaying its methodology in targeting what the company sees as misinformation. At a minimum, Stone should be nowhere near communications on these issues.
Stephen L. Miller ( @redsteeze ) has written for National Review, the New York Post, and Fox News and hosts the Versus Media podcast.
