Taking A Stand: Candace Owens Suing Facebook For This 'One Sided' Practice

Written By BlabberBuzz | Saturday, 07 November 2020 02:50 PM
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Conservative activist Candace Owens said Thursday that she intends to sue Facebook's third-party fact-checkers over clear censorship of her social media posts.

"It is time to fact-check the fact-checkers," Owens said in a video published in her Twitter account. "I'm going to put these suckers through discovery and figure out what the relationship is that they have with Facebook."

Owens gave an example of an occurrence that she for facebook's mind crossed the line, "Quite literally a doctor gave his opinion about COVID-19, which I shared, and Facebook issued a strike on my account because they said only information that they agree with about COVID-19 ... was acceptable," she said.

She explained that her Facebook page was demonetized as a result, suggesting she could no longer use the page for her profit.

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While speaking about censorship, she also mentioned the President, who has had some tweets flagged for allegedly baseless claims and misleading information.

"I decided I was not going to give up and sit down," Owens said before railing against the presidential election, which was still uncertain late Thursday as votes proceeded to be processed in some states. "The fact-checkers. .. they are activists for the left that shut down your speech if they don't like it."

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Owens also said she reached a pair of attorneys, including Todd McMurtry, who was part of the legal team for former Covington (Ky.) Catholic High School student Nick Sandmann.

The defendants include USA Today and Lead Stories Fact Checker, Owens said. Both are third-party, fact-checking allies for Facebook.

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Facebook started its third-party, fact-checking program in 2016 as disinformation campaigns overwhelmed the social media site throughout the presidential election. Partners signed up for the program to verify content posted to Facebook and Instagram, and identify whether it is false or misleading.

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The fact-checkers apply ratings to content that range from "false," "altered" and "missing context." When such ratings are applied, Facebook may either decrease its distribution or add tags to notify users about further reporting elsewhere.

Other actions include informing users with a pop-up notice so they can determine if they want to read the post for themselves.

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Though it seems Owens is not the only one who thinks censorship has gone too far, as John Matze, Parler CEO, argued Thursday that Twitter and Facebook are engaging in biased "editorialization" in the midst of the 2020 presidential election.

"Once you start content curation and you start fact-checking, you're introducing bias and I don't think that there's any perfect group without bias, so in terms of being a platform for transparency and free speech, they've gone way too far," Matze said.

Facebook, Leader Stories and Gannett, the parent company of USA Today, chose not to comment.

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