‘This, frankly, is at the pinnacle of irresponsibility and is intentionally reckless…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) After briefly falling from grace with the Left, one-time liberal darlings Facebook proved their allegiance again by forcibly scrubbing all references to so-called whistleblower Eric Ciaramella.
With Google-owned YouTube joining the ‘resistance’ effort against outing the CIA operative—whose claims are central to House impeachment proceedings—Twitter has become Democrats’ latest corporate whipping-boy for maintaining that its policy permits the posting of Ciaramella’s name and photograph.
Twitter’s rules allow “sharing information that is publicly available elsewhere, in a non-abusive manner,” according to an article in The Washington Post.
Twitter spokeswoman Katie Rosborough clarified, however, that posting information such as Ciaramella’s home address would not be permitted.
“Per our private information policy, any tweets that include personally identifiable information about any individual, including the alleged whistleblower, would be in violation of the Twitter Rules,” she said.
Nonetheless, Trump opponents have seethed over the leftist informant’s unmasking in the conservative press, claiming—without evidence—that exposing Ciaramella could subject him to potential danger.
They maintained that the unsupported concerns over “harm” to Ciaramella outweighed the public interest and First Amendment rights of allowing the information—ignoring the fact that concealing the whistleblower’s identity might also pose considerable harm to U.S. democracy and due process.
“Any mention of the potential whistleblower’s name violates our coordinating harm policy, which prohibits content ‘outing of witness, informant, or activist’” said Facebook spokesman Andy Stone.
“We are removing any and all mentions of the potential whistleblower’s name and will revisit this decision should their name be widely published in the media or used by public figures in debate,” Stone said.
In truth, the greatest harm it poses is to the partisan impeachment narrative, which rests on the false pretense that House Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff, D-Calif., has been serving the public good in his secretive probe.
Evidence points to Schiff having colluded with deep-state intelligence operatives to orchestrate the latest efforts to undermine—and possibly remove—President Donald Trump.
Far from being a dispassionate observer, Ciaramella seems to have been a plant, left over from the Obama administration, with deep ties to key figures in the Ukraine conspiracy and the interlinked Russia hoax that preceded it.
Left-wing media outlets, meanwhile, have outdone themselves with their virtue-signaling attempts to suppress the widely circulated information, and Ciaramella’s lawyers have menacingly threatened legal repercussions to contain the spread.
“I am deeply troubled with Facebook seeking to profit from advertising that would place someone in harm’s way,” said Andrew Bakaj, one of the whistleblower attorneys. “This, frankly, is at the pinnacle of irresponsibility and is intentionally reckless.”
It echoed recent attempts to bully Facebook into removing Trump political ads from the platform that exposed the corrupt activities of former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
Trump had asked Ukraine’s president to reopen investigations into the Bidens—the fact of which Ciaramella allegedly used as the basis of his formal whistleblower complaint, asserting that Trump sought a quid-pro-quo arrangement.
Although no evidence of such an arrangement exists in the transcript of the phone call, and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has denied it, Democrats have continued to push the narrative while glossing over much worse evidence of their own corruption.
That poses a dilemma for media and social-media platforms, which must repeatedly flip–flop on their own policies as Democrats shift the goalposts on transparency to align with their political agenda du jour.
Ironically, the leftists now praising Facebook’s discretion had earlier attacked it for allowing the Biden ads while citing Twitter’s decision to refuse political ads.
Their previous campaign to boycott Facebook also criticized Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for having met recently with conservative thought-leaders to allow them to voice their concerns—even though the billionaire had maintained close ties to the Obama administration with no objection.