A pro-gun group filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission against Facebook, AFP Fact Check and Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., for violating election law by suppressing information about Harris’s views.
After the Gun Owners of America shared articles about Harris’s anti-gun record, Facebook allowed AFP, a foreign media outlet sponsored by the French government, to “fact check” the articles and label them “false.”
AFP insisted that Harris is not anti-gun, even though the articles in question cited an amicus brief in which Harris advocated for various gun-control policies that would restrict an individual’s right to bear arms.
The amicus brief, which Harris signed as a district attorney in San Francisco, was filed with the Supreme Court in the D.C. v. Heller case—a landmark case affirming an individual’s constitutional right to bear arms that has been invoked regularly in the recent confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett.
The DAs, however, argued in their brief that states were allowed to restrict firearm sales because the Second Amendment only guaranteed gun rights to militias, not private citizens.
“[T]he Second Amendment does not apply to legislation passed by state or local governments, and the restrictions bear a reasonable relationship to protecting public safety and thus do not violate a personal constitutional right,” they claimed.
During the Democrat primaries in her own short-lived run for president, Harris advocated for federally-mandated red-flag laws, universal background checks and raising the minimum age for gun purchases.
She also said she would ban states from having stand-your-ground laws, and would use executive action to do it if Congress chosen to act.
Despite these facts, AFP claimed criticism of Harris’s record on gun ownership was unfounded. Facebook endorsed the AFP’s fact check, going so far as to ban GOA’s Virginia director, John Crump, for sharing one of the articles AFP deemed problematic.
That effectively constituted foreign election interference, the GOA complaint stated.
By allowing AFP to censor information, Facebook “recruited an agent of a European government to control which messages about U.S. elections may be heard, and which should be suppressed,” it said.
Through this fact-checking program, AFP can “censor, diminish, or even remove opposing views that are posted on Facebook, and to superimpose AFP’s own version of the alleged ‘truth’ in its place,” it continued.
GOA also asked the FEC to investigate whether Facebook is inadvertently allowing a foreign entity to financially assist a U.S. election due to the fact that thousands of Facebook employees—some of whom could be connected to AFP—have donated to Harris and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s campaign.
“[Facebook’s] employees have used corporate time and resources to target and remove political speech critical of their favored candidate, because such speech has been deemed harmful to that candidate, all for the purpose of influencing the 2020 Presidential Election,” it said.
If the FEC doesn’t act, Congress should take action to crack down on Big Tech censorship, Crump said in a statement.
“The social media platforms try to play both sides of the fence,” he said.
“When someone posts something illegal, the company claims that they are just a ‘platform,’ so they are protected from civil and criminal penalties,” he continued. “When they want to remove opinions they don’t like, Facebook claims that they moderate content like a publisher. It is time they either allow free speech or the government should strip Facebook of their Digital Millennium Copyright Act protections.”
