‘Whether it originates from the Kremlin or Trump Tower, these lies and conspiracy theories threaten to undermine the integrity of our elections in America…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) The Left’s efforts to control the flow of information have kicked into high gear in a tug-of-war over dueling Ukraine conspiracies.
After President Donald Trump released an ad attacking former Vice President Joe Biden over his role in a Ukrainian ethics scandal, some biased left-wing news operations, such as CNN, refused to air the ad.
Now, liberals are furious that other media platforms will not help them circle the wagons in their cover-up operation.
Outlets like Vox and Yahoo News indignantly reported that Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, MSNBC and Fox were among those that had declined the demands from Biden’s presidential campaign to pull the offending material.
Further riling the propagandist press was that Facebook refused to allow the ads to be vetted by left-wing ‘fact-checkers’—something it has faced criticism for doing with content in the past.
In a letter to the Biden campaign, first disclosed by The New York Times, Katie Harbath, Facebook’s public policy director for global elections, called efforts to suppress the ad undemocratic.
“Our approach is grounded in Facebook’s fundamental belief in free expression, respect for the democratic process, and the belief that, in mature democracies with a free press, political speech is already arguably the most scrutinized speech there is,” wrote Harbath. “Thus, when a politician speaks or makes an ad, we do not send it to third party fact checkers.”
Following years of failed efforts to dig up political dirt on Trump using costly, tax-funded investigations, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared last month that House Democrats would be launching their impeachment proceedings based on the claims of an anonymous, partisan whistleblower.
The source alleged that Trump sought a quid-pro-quo arrangement with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to investigate a conspiracy linked to Biden, who was the Democratic primary front-runner at the time.
A transcript later released by the White House gave no indication of any quid-pro-quo exchange agreement.
Yet, many in the media, while reporting on Democrats’ impromptu impeachment probe against Trump, have denied that existing evidence—including a video of Biden himself—implicates the former vice president in the scandal, which essentially involved the same thing Democrats accused Trump of doing.
Biden admitted pressuring Ukraine’s previous administration to fire its top prosecutor while leveraging a billion-dollar loan guarantee. The prosecutor had been investigating energy company Burisma, which had Biden’s son Hunter on its payroll as a board member.
As Biden publicly called for Trump to be impeached, his campaign operatives complained that no questions should be asked about his own scandalous conduct.
“Whether it originates from the Kremlin or Trump Tower, these lies and conspiracy theories threaten to undermine the integrity of our elections in America,” campaign spokesman TJ Ducklo said in a statement.
“It is unacceptable for any social media company to knowingly allow deliberately misleading material to corrupt its platform,” he griped.
There is no evidence to support the claims from Biden, CNN and others that the information in the ads is “objectively false” since the prosecutor who was investigating the claims was forcibly removed without making a definitive determination.
The current impeachment efforts by Congressional Democrats also seemed determined to leave Biden’s case unopened as they target the request from Trump for Ukraine to resume its investigation. The U.S. and Ukraine have a longstanding agreement to share information in such cases.
Leftist reporters sought to find an array of ‘boogeymen’ in the refusal by social media outlets, noting that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently met with Trump, that Harbath had ties to Republican organizations and that the social media network stood to lose millions by refusing the Trump campaign.
Ducklo fumed that Trump’s audacity in wanting “to influence public opinion” in a way that was rightfully undermining to Democrats’ credibility “poisons the public discourse and chips away at our democracy.”