A conservative media outlet has fact-checking power at Facebook and—guess what—it’s using that to censor liberal media outlets. The Weekly Standard, which is one of just five outlets that Facebook allows to “fact check” other publications, flagged a ThinkProgress article about Brett Kavanaugh’s position on Roe v. Wade as false. That’s a serious threat, not just to ThinkProgress but to other groups sharing the article:
When an article is labeled false under Facebook’s third-party fact-checking system, groups that share that article on Facebook receive a notification informing them that the article received a “False Rating” and that “pages and websites” that share that piece “will see their overall distribution and their ability to monetize and advertise removed.”
The Weekly Standard has no liberal counterpart as a fact-checker at Facebook, and no wonder—Facebook’s head of global news partnerships is Campbell Brown, who is a right-wing activist against public education and teachers unions with the deep ties to Republicans that entails.
So how did ThinkProgress run afoul of the Weekly Standard’s rigorous fact-checking operation? Ian Millhiser, an experienced legal analyst who’s clerked on a federal appeals court and been published in many traditional media outlets, wrote a piece arguing that Kavanaugh had communicated he would overturn Roe by embracing a legal standard that “courts should determine which rights are protected by the Constitution by asking which rights are ‘deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition’” while also having expressed the view that “even a first-year law student could tell you that the Glucksberg’s approach to unenumerated rights was not consistent with the approach of the abortion cases such as Roe vs. Wade in 1973, as well as the 1992 decision reaffirming Roe, known as Planned Parenthood vs. Casey.”
To the Weekly Standard, it’s inaccurate to say that Kavanaugh has told us he’d overturn Roe because he didn’t say “I would overturn Roe” in so many words—even though he told us the standard he would apply to abortion and that he thinks abortion does not meet that standard.
And even though Millhiser was both directly and accurately quoting Kavanaugh and cited two law professors interpreting Kavanaugh’s words in the same way, the Weekly Standard’s word is law where Facebook is concerned. That means that groups sharing this accurate analysis of the stated legal views of a controversial Supreme Court nominee are threatened with “see[ing] their overall distribution and their ability to monetize and advertise removed.”
This is outrageous. Facebook needs to not only reverse this specific instance of censorship but take the Weekly Standard off its very very short list of fact-checkers.
