The Media Research Center’s recent attacks on Facebook have been as lame as ever — so much so that it repeated the same “election interference” attack on it that made against Google just a month earlier. Gabriela Pariseau and Dan Schneider did the deed in an April 23 post:
If Facebook, the company, had a personal Facebook profile, its “relationship status” with free speech would say, “It’s complicated.” The platform, however, has consistently courted election interference efforts.
MRC Free Speech America researchers compiled 39 times Facebook was caught interfering in U.S. elections since 2008. The platform’s record of election-interfering censorship began in 2012, reached a crescendo in 2020 and has begun fading somewhat in the early stages of the 2024 electoral cycle. All the while, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly made pro-free speech comments including during his famous 2019 speech at Georgetown University.
“We can either continue to stand for free expression understanding its messiness but believing that the long journey towards greater progress requires confronting ideas that challenge us. Or we can decide that the cost is simply too great,” said Zuckerberg. “I’m here today because I believe that we must continue to stand for free expression.”
He has similarly called politically-motivated censorship “dangerous” and said that Facebook and other social media platforms should not be acting as the “arbiter of truth.” And yet, from 2012 through 2024, Facebook has vacillated between a hands-off approach to free speech online and repeated election interference through policy changes and outright censorship of political candidates and ideas.
But nearly all of the examples Pariseau and Schneider cite are of conservatives and other farther to the right, and nearly all of them involve Facebook invoking content moderation against people who spread falsehoods and conspiracy theories. For instance, they claim that Robert Kennedy Jr. was “censored”; in fact, according to the CensorTrack link they provide, a claim he made about blaming Tylenol for autism merely received “a fact-check label” that in turn linked to a fact-check on the issue — none of which is “censorship” since all one had to do is click to remove the label and read the misleading post.
Pariseau and Schneider similarly claimed that Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake was “censored” in 2022, claiming “she said her Instagram account was restricted for 24 hours after ‘posting photos of Arizona and Arizonans.'” In fact, if one looks closely at the image behind the restriction notice, it’s clear she was repeating claims from a audit of the 2020 election in Maricopa County, Ariz., run by the shady, secretive company Cyber Ninjas, that was discredited when it was released. Pariseau and Schneider censored that part of the story.
Pariseau and Schneider concluded with four “recommendations,” three of which involving demanding governmental crackdowns by right-wing politicians:
- House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) should direct relevant committees and committee chairmen to investigate Facebook for interfering in elections.
- State legislatures should ensure that Big Tech cannot engage in viewpoint discrimination.
- State attorneys general and state secretaries of state should take appropriate action to enforce state election laws as it relates to Facebook’s election interference.
Again, Pariseau and Schneider refuse to acknowledge that, as a private company, Facebook has every right to moderate content on its platform, and that it’s not “censorship” for it to do so. They also offer no evidence that only conservative politicians face such moderation, as they frame it.
Of course, these shoddy and partisan claims have to be flogged inside the right-wing bubble, and MRC chief Brent Bozell did just that by parroting those claims on the radio show of his right-wing buddy:
Media Research Center President Brent Bozell called out yet another Big Tech company for interfering in U.S. elections — and he has the receipts to prove it.
During a Tuesday interview with nationally syndicated radio host Mark Levin on The Mark Levin Show, Bozell lambasted Facebook following an MRC Special Report detailing how the Meta-owned social media platform interfered in U.S. elections 39 times since 2008.
Bozell minced no words in his response to the MRC findings, stating, “We looked at Facebook since 2008. We found 39 examples of Facebook directly interfering with political campaigns.” Bozell said, “This is, it’s systematic. … These Big Tech companies have got to stop interfering.” The MRC president referred to a bombshell report published by MRC Free Speech America on Monday.
Schneider went on a little-watched far-right TV show to promote the reoprt, as noted in an April 24 post by Tom Olohan:
MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider addressed over a decade of rampant Facebook election interference in a conversation with Just the News founder John Solomon.
During the April 24 edition of Just the News, No Noise, Schneider went after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerburg and Facebook for 39 instances of election interference between 2008 and 2024. “Facebook has engaged in censorship over and over and over,” Schneider said in response to an MRC Special Report.
[…]Expanding on his remarks, Schneider added: “Mark Zuckerberg has said to us, to us conservatives that the people of Facebook … don’t understand who conservatives are or what we believe.’ They only understand the will to power and to use their company to try to promote, you know, the next president of the United States.
Olohan followed with an April 26 post hyping other mentions of the report on obscure right-wing outlets:
MRC Free Speech Vice President Dan Schneider went after Facebook for not only repeatedly engaging in election interference but also for relentlessly censoring conservatives.
During the April 24 edition of WJLA-TV’s The National Desk, Schneider hammered this point again. “Basically, 98% of the firepower is directed to conservatives,” he said. “There are instances where Facebook has taken down liberals. But typically, those liberals are either in opposition to Joe Biden, you know, like RFK Jr., or else they were in opposition to Facebook itself.”
“The National Desk” is not a local show but airs nationwide on stations owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group, which the MRC pretends does not have a right-wing bias. Olohan also gushed that “The Daily Wire host Michael Knowles also addressed the “really good” MRC Special Report” without disclosing that he too is a right-winger.
UPDATE: The MRC didn’t tell its readers this, but this bogus study also got a stenographical writeup at WorldNetDaily, complete with an added reference to WND’s old (and similarly bogus) hobbyhorse of Zuckerberg giving out “some $400 million plus to various elections officials to help them deal with COVID. They mostly used it to recruit Joe Biden voters.” The article also touted how “WND reported when the Media Research Center reported researchers found 41 times when Google interfered in American elections.”