We’re Still Waiting For Facebook To Atone For The 11 Times (We Know Of) It Censored The Federalist
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Tuesday that Facebook plans to do away with its extensive and partisan fact-checking program in favor of a community notes system modeled after Elon Musk’s X reforms.
Zuckerberg claims the change will spur the Big Tech giant to “focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms,” prompting some to hail the decision as a victory for free speech.
But Meta doesn’t just get to erase its years of political censorship with a carefully scripted apology video. Zuckerberg blames “governments and legacy media” for encouraging censorship, but his tech giant willingly complied, throttling dissent at the behest of the federal government. Meta still reserves the right to deal strikes and “reduce the distribution of certain hoax content.”
“When Pages do share something that’s been marked False by a fact-checker, we notify them that their shared post will be demoted, regardless of whether they are the original publisher of that content,” Meta states on its policy enforcement blog.
Only when pages “stop sharing misinformation” does Meta “restore their distribution and ability to monetize and advertise.”
Facebook has used punitive “fact-checks” to inflict reputational and financial harm on outlets like The Federalist for publishing counter-narrative information. The Federalist saw its first fake fact-check from Facebook in 2020, after a year of facing censorship from other tech platforms over our reporting on Covid-19 mandates and government lockdowns. Shortly after the 2020 election and events at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, we noticed an increase in censorship attacks on our publication, including a large dip in Facebook traffic and interactions.
It is impossible to quantify the damage censorship does to a media organization, whose existence is predicated upon reaching an audience. Publishing true reporting in the era of Facebook censorship has come with great cost. Every “missing context” label comes with the threat: “People who repeatedly share false information might have their posts moved lower in News Feed so other people are less likely to see them.”
Until Zuckerberg makes up for every single time Facebook used its fake fact-checking apparatus to downrank our reporting for partisan reasons, he’s still one of the bad guys.
1. Counter-Fact-Check on Georgia Ballot Counting
Weeks after the 2020 presidential election — in which Mark Zuckerberg meddled to the tune of $419 million, by the way — Federalist Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway published a story challenging a “fact-check” about Georgia ballot counting by an outfit called “Lead Stories.” Lead Stories claimed to have debunked the testimony of Republicans alarmed by suspicious events at a Fulton County ballot-counting site. Hemingway contended that the surveillance video in question didn’t debunk their concerns at all.
As soon as Hemingway’s story was published on Facebook, it was marked with a text bubble declaring it to be “Partly False Information.” The story had been “checked by independent fact-checkers,” the label said. Who were the “independent fact-checkers”? Lead Stories, of course!
2. Fact-Checking Facts About Masks
Facebook flagged a Federalist article about the ineffectiveness of masks against Covid after one of its sketchy third-party “fact-checkers” deemed it “inaccurate” and “misleading.” Science Feedback claimed in an email to the Federalist that the article misrepresented the study’s findings even though “Danish researchers found that there was no statistically significant difference between wearing a mask or not in preventing people from contracting COVID-19.”
3. Running Interference for Green Energy
In February 2021, mere weeks after a Texas power grid failure left millions freezing and hundreds dead, Facebook slapped two separate “fact checks” on a Federalist story that directly linked the Lone Star State’s electricity struggles to green energy initiatives. The tag used articles penned by Politifact and the Chinese-funded Lead Stories to claim that the Federalist article was “missing context” and “could mislead people.”
After a word salad blaming natural gas plants for the widespread blackouts, Politifact acknowledged that the wind farms Federalist author Jason Isaac criticized in his article “ran at about half of what was expected,” which did contribute to the electricity shortage. The Lead Stories link plastered on The Federalist’s post did not even address Isaac’s argument directly. Instead, it scrutinized an unrelated Facebook post from a user who noted the green energy sector’s failures during the Texas power crisis.
4. Fact-Checking an Opinion About the Chauvin Murder Verdict
When The Federalist’s Joy Pullmann penned a piece arguing Americans could not trust the verdict in former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin’s murder trial because of the partisan media storm surrounding George Floyd’s death, Facebook claimed her article was “missing context.” Accompanying a giant warning to anyone who tried to click on the link redirecting him to The Federalist website was a USA Today article asserting that that opinion “ignores the steps taken to ensure the trial was indeed fair.”
As Pullmann noted, USA Today “uncovered not one single factual error” in her story. In fact, the USA Today “fact-check” was aimed at another post “expressing a similar opinion.” Yet it was used by Facebook to justify reducing the reach of Pullmann and other Federalist authors’ writing.
5. The Federalist Put in Facebook Jail for Repeating Something ‘60 Minutes’ Was Allowed to Say
Facebook throttled a Federalist story headlined “Pentagon Develops Microchip Detecting COVID-19 By Tracking Your Blood” under the guise that it was “missing context.” One of Big Tech’s shady third-party “fact-checkers,” Science Feedback, argued in an article overshadowing The Federalist post that “calling the hydrogel sensor a microchip is inaccurate.”
The “60 Minutes” report The Federalist highlighted and quoted in its article, however, remained untouched by Facebook’s censorship claws.
6. Adding ‘Context’ to Fauci’s Masking Flip-Flop
In June 2021, emails revealed that Dr. Anthony Fauci had admitted, “The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out [a] virus” at the outbreak of the Covid-19 response, before he oversaw a federal push for healthy Americans to wear paper masks over their faces when interacting with others. The Federalist reported on these emails under the headline “Emails Show Fauci Knew Masks Weren’t Very Effective Before Pushing Universal Masking.”
Facebook flagged the article and linked a “fact-check” by a foreign news group, which added the “context” that “Fauci’s email reflected the consensus at the time among US health experts.”
7. Covering for Buttigieg’s Bike Blunder
In April 2021, Biden Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was filmed mounting a bike that appeared to have just been unloaded from a bike rack attached to a Secret Service SUV, which then followed behind him. While legacy media praised Buttigieg for his display of carbon consciousness, The Federalist’s Madeline Osburn poked fun at the stunt under the headline “Clown Show: Pete Buttigieg ‘Bikes’ To Work After SUVs Drive Him Part Of The Way.”
Facebook flagged a video version of the story posted on The Federalist’s page as “False Information.” In a linked “fact-check,” Lead Stories claimed without evidence that “Pete Buttigieg Did NOT Stage A Short Bike Ride For a Photo Op.” Lead Stories’ evidence for that claim was that Buttigieg himself had shared the video and “it seems unlikely that he would have chosen to share it” if it was staged. The fact-checking outfit also cited a Transportation Department representative who claimed Buttigieg had indeed “biked both to and from a Cabinet meeting at the White House.”
As Osburn noted at the time, “Of course he biked to and from the cabinet meeting. No stories dispute this fact, because the whole point of Buttigieg’s stunt was to be seen riding to and from the White House on his bike.”
8. Censoring Criticism of Censorship
In December 2021, The Federalist published a story by mRNA pioneer Dr. Robert Malone, Yale epidemiology professor Dr. Harvey Risch, and immunology professor Dr. Byram Bridle titled “Forcing People Into COVID Vaccines Ignores Important Scientific Information.” In their first sentence, the three experts condemned tech censors’ “attacks on free speech and science.”
Facebook deemed the story to be “missing context” and marked it with a label and a link to a Lead Stories “fact-check” of a completely different story. Lead Stories didn’t “actually address The Federalist article or any of the claims made in it,” as Jordan Boyd noted at the time.
9. Threatening Restriction Over Election Reporting
In March 2023, Facebook affixed a “fact-check” from Politifact to a Federalist post titled “How Georgia Became Democrats’ Test Site For Their 2024 Private Takeover Of Election Offices,” which detailed the infusion of millions of dollars into Democrat areas in exchange for their participation in the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence. The group was linked to one of the nonprofits through which Mark Zuckerberg himself funneled cash into disproportionately Democrat districts in 2020. Facebook claimed the story was “Partly False” because Politifact took offense at the word “takeover.”
“Pages and websites that repeatedly share false information might be restricted,” Facebook warned us.
10. Flagging Reporting on FBI’s ‘Deadly Force’ Authorization
In May, The Federalist and other outlets reported on court documents revealing that FBI agents sent by the Biden Justice Department to raid Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in search of classified documents from his presidency had been authorized to use “deadly force” if necessary. Facebook affixed a notice to the post, claiming that “independent fact-checkers reviewed the information and said it was missing context and could mislead people.” A “fact-check” linked by Facebook claimed such reporting “misrepresent[ed] the Justice Department’s standard policies.” Even though it was true the FBI had authorization to use deadly force against a former president in his home, such authorization was “boilerplate language,” the fact-checkers said.
11. Dismissing a Police Report as ‘No Verifying Evidence’
Facebook was censoring Federalist reporting as recently as September, just over a month before the 2024 presidential election. After residents of Springfield, Ohio, voiced concerns about Haitian noncitizens on temporary parole in the United States allegedly capturing and eating small animals in public parks, The Federalist published a police report in which a resident had reported Haitians with “geese in their hands” to a police dispatcher. Although the story was sourced to a police report and audio recording, Facebook slapped a label on it deeming the reporting “false information,” and Lead Stories claimed it had “No Verifying Evidence.”
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Elle Purnell is the elections editor at The Federalist.
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