Campaign Action
Last week, Facebook’s Vice President Nick Clegg said that it would not stop politicians from lying or spreading hate-speech on their platform. Facebook did not use so many words, instead they used more in the hopes of obfuscating the fact that they were announcing that political ads would now be immune from the social media giant’s third-party fact-checking standards. Makes it much easier to get that ad revenue, you know?
This week, an advertisement from Trump’s reelection campaign took full advantage of Facebook’s feigned and intentional impotence. The 30-second advertisement accuses former Vice President Joe Biden of promising $1 billion dollars to Ukraine—but only if their leadership fired the prosecutor who was investigating Joe’s son, Hunter, and his activities in the country. These charges are completely false. They have been investigated and reported as false. Even if there were something to investigate, the statements made in the Trump advertisement would still be false.
The ad continues to flip reality on its head, insisting that it wasn’t the whistleblower complaint that launched the impeachment inquiry—instead, the ad claims, the inquiry is revenge for Trump’s attempts to get Democrats in Congress to investigate the Bidens. It’s mind-numbing. George Orwell would be embarrassed by how clunky this bit of fascistic propaganda has been written.
Popular Info reports that these ads, a $1.5 million collaboration between the Trump campaign and the RNC, are the direct result of last week’s Facebook policy change. Additionally, at least two of the third-party fact-checking services that Facebook relies on have already flagged the statements made in the Trump advertisement as false. Again, Facebook’s own rules—specifically Rule 13—should automatically cause these ads to be removed. Instead, each video is clocking hundreds of thousands of views by users who believe the platform when it claims to be fighting disinformation.
To understand the root of Facebook’s greed, one only needs to look at how transparently they have been promoting and supporting conservative propaganda for the last four years. While Republicans like Trump insist that Facebook is a liberally biased platform, all of the statistics, as well as Facebook’s hirings of right-wing media personalities, expose the massive social media platform for what it is: a conservative, greedy business fueled by an autocratic philosophy.