With eighteen days to go until the election, Facebook blocked pro-life group Susan B. Anthony List from running an ad targeted at swing-state voters highlighting Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ position on abortion based on a now-retracted “fact check” from the Dispatch.
In a comment to Breitbart News, Facebook admitted that the ads had been blocked based on a retracted fact-check, and said the platform is working to reinstate the ads.
In a tweet, the Susan B. Anthony List announced that Facebook blocked two of its ads from running — another intervention that protects Democrat candidate Joe Biden from negative attention, just days after the platform suppressed a bombshell New York Post story exposing new potential links between the Biden family and the Ukrainian energy company Burisma.
In a further tweet, the SBA List posted the video ad that Facebook had censored.
“Facebook has rejected two of our video ads in battleground states Pennsylvania & Wisconsin,” said the organization. ” They are using an inaccurate “fact check” at The Dispatch to justify their censorship” The fact check by the Dispatch appears to have been deleted, with the “fact checkers” posting a “mea culpa” that reads in part, “The fact-check was published in error and in draft form, before it had been through final edits and our own internal fact-checking process. As a result, the viral post was assigned a “partly false” rating that we have determined is not justified after completing The Dispatch fact-checking process. We regret the error and apologize to the Women Speak Out PAC. We’ve pulled the fact-check and lifted the rating.”
The 15-second ad says:
“Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are extreme on abortion. Biden and Harris support abortion up to the moment of birth, all at taxypayer expense, and they promise to nominate only pro-abortion judges. Biden and Harris: troubling ideas, disturbing policies.”
Watch the ad @Facebook just censored, falsely claiming that Biden-Harris *do not* support abortion up until the moment of birth: pic.twitter.com/0s95hI7zPE
— Susan B. Anthony List #ConfirmAmy (@SBAList) October 16, 2020
“Big Tech and the media are teaming up to run interference for the Biden-Harris campaign on what is a losing issue for Democrats – their shameful support for abortion on demand through birth,” said SBA List President Marjorie Dannenfelser.
“This is the latest example of Facebook censoring political speech and is perfectly timed to shut down SBA List’s vital digital communications as we work to reach eight million voters in key battlegrounds in the final days before Election Day.”
The organization also noted that a story from the pro-life news publisher LifeSiteNews recently had one of its articles censored by the platform, for stating that Kamala Harris, during her time as California’s attorney general, tried to prosecute a pro-life activist.
This comes just TWO days after @Facebook marked as "false" a @LifeNewsHQ article which stated the FACT that as California AG, Kamala Harris tried to put @daviddaleiden in jail for exposing Planned Parenthood's baby parts trafficking #PPSellsBabyParts pic.twitter.com/WqRLde7efV
— Susan B. Anthony List #ConfirmAmy (@SBAList) October 16, 2020
Breitbart News will monitor the reinstatement of the organization’s ads and report any change.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. His new book, #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election, which contains exclusive interviews with sources inside Google, Facebook, and other tech companies, is currently available for purchase.
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