Oopsie! Meta, the monster (in many senses of the word) parent company of social media giants Facebook and Instagram, blocked the link to a new, 30-minute infomercial supporting the candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the rebel independent Presidential candidate whom Democrats wish they could vaporize with their bad thoughts. Meta says it was a “mistake.”
Maybe it was. The embargo didn’t last long: the ad was only unavailable from late afternoon last Friday to the middle of last Saturday. A spokesman for Meta said the link had been incorrectly flagged as spam. For some reason, RFK Jr.’s campaign and supporters don’t trust Meta. Tony Lyons, a founder the super PAC that paid for the ad, says his group plans to sue Meta in federal court for censorship and First Amendment violations.
“When social media companies censor a presidential candidate, the public can’t learn what that candidate actually believes and what policies they would pursue if elected,” Mr. Lyons said. “We are left with the propaganda and lies from the most powerful and most corrupt groups and individuals.”
There is no reason to trust the judgment, motives or excuses of Meta. In “Denial,” the film about the lawsuit by British Holocaust denier and fake historian Richard Irving against American Deborah Lipstadt, Tom Wilkerson as Lipstadt’s barrister Richard Rampton, in the process of excoriating Irving to the court where the case is being tried, says in a memorable speech,
My lord, during this trial, we have heard from Professor Evans and others of at least 25 major falsifications of history. Well, says Mr. Irving, “all historians make mistakes.” But there is a difference between negligence, which is random in its effect, and a deliberateness, which is far more one-sided…. He is, to use an analogy, like the waiter who always gives the wrong change. If he is honest, we may expect sometimes his mistakes to favor the customers, sometimes himself. But Mr. Irving is the dishonest waiter. All his mistakes work in his favor…
Meta is also like the dishonest waiter. Yes, I have a bias against Facebook, a justifiable one, after the platform banned Ethics Alarms for almost two years because it deemed the topic of one of my posts (the weaponized taboo against “blackface”) insufficiently supportive of progressive positions and values.
Facebook and Instagram will have far too much influence on the 2024 election already. Like the mainstream media and the rest of Big Tech, Meta cannot make “mistakes” without being fairly suspected of election interference on behalf of its patrons, Democrats and the Biden administration. After the video’s release, Instagram and Facebook users reported that their posts with the link had been removed for violating the platforms’ terms of service. The campaign then released a TikTok with a compilation of error messages, and sent out a fund-raising appeal to supporters asking them to document such “election interference.” Kennedy called the ad “the Bobby Kennedy video Facebook doesn’t want you to see.”
All of the focus on Meta’s abuses of its power, real, imagined and suspected, benefits American voters and the democracy President Biden’s campaign narrative claims to be so concerned about while his administration and allies do whatever they can think of to undermine it to their advantage.
This is just an early skirmish in what promises to be an ugly battle.
Ethics Alarms 
It wouldn’t be as ugly a battle if social media and tech giants had not demonstrated that they are willing to take sides in politics. Mistakes do happen. They happen all the time. When companies demonstrate that they are partisan; however, they give up the benefit of the doubt that people of good will extend to possible mistakes.
In other words, when you prove you are willing to suppress the speech of ideological opponents, you can’t complain if people don’t believe you when it happens purely by chance.
I don’t trust Meta, either. They wouldn’t allow links to my blog for almost a year, and you’re not going to tell me that it was because I’m not liberal enough.
Nor do I trust lawyers who get their names and their clients’ names in the proverbial newspaper by suing a corporation over a brief and corrected, incident. Or candidates, especially multi-millionaires, who have precisely zero chance of winning, for that matter.
Also: first paragraph… I think you mean Instagram. Instapundit is something else.
1. Why was your blog blocked? Too erudite?
2. I’m of two minds about such suits. It they are frivolous,meaning they have no valid legal basis, then they are obviously unethical. If there is some basis in law, however, even if they are 90% likely to be thrown out, if the parties are prominent enough the Streisand Effect takes over. The more help the public gets recognizing what a malign force Meta is, the better.
3. I’m surprised I didn’t type “Instant coffee.” %$#@!!!!
Why my blog was blocked? No idea, really. They never told me except that it had “violated [their] terms and conditions,” and the appeals process is designed to fail. One of my friends said she’d seen something about it being a spam site. Obviously, it wasn’t, but you can’t argue with an algorithm. Incompetence instead of intentionality, I suspect, but there’s a point at which allowing the former becomes the latter.
Anyway, I’d just post something to the FB page, using “dot” instead of, you know, a dot. It took readers an extra step instead of just clicking on a link, and probably cost me a little traffic, but not appreciably so. And the ability to link just came back without explanation, too.
The shortcut to link a post to the FB page hasn’t worked recently, either, although that could be a blogspot problem. It takes more work now, but I can post a link.
La la how the life goes on.
Social media platforms and search engines have the inclination and ability to impact public opinion and election results. As much as I hate governmental regulation, in this case, it is necessary. Relying on the court system to curb their abuses will be burdensome and time-consuming.
These entities need to be treated as utilities. The problem with this solution is much of the DC bureaucracy is replete with progressives. It would seem the only solution would be a multimember board with equal representation of Democrats and Republicans. The majority and minority leaders of the Senate and House could appoint two members each from its membership. A three-year single term for each member might minimize abuse by panel members.
Perhaps EA members can suggest other solutions to minimize social media’s potential impact on free speech.
The virtual world needs to be treated like the real world in this instance. If I rent a storefront, the owner can’t just keep walking by and closing my store if they don’t like my opinions or the legal things I sell. Why is it so hard to see that a YouTube channel is like that? I enter into an agreement that lets me post things on a site or buy internet access. It is not their business to tell me what I can and can’t put on the site or what I can and can’t see on the internet. If their argument is that they can’t sell enough ad space for the content on my site, then charge me a hosting fee.
I wish I could say that I thought this had much of a chance. However, the probability that any judge is going to look at this and do anything about it is slim to none. Meta will say ‘it was just an oversight’ and the judge is going to dismiss it. You can show 10,000 such ‘oversights’ and point out the ideological similarities in the ‘oversights’, but the judge is just going to say “Meta is a big corporation and they can’t be held accountable for every small, corrected, error that happens”. They may also point out that you can’t attribute to malice something that could just be incompetence. No judge is going to buy an argument based on the fact that random error goes both ways and error that goes only 1 way has a cause.
I may be more cynical about this than usual because I found out a friend’s son is being railroaded in the courts. He got into some bad business and is facing a steep prison term. He had a plea deal worked out, but his lawyer didn’t show up in court. She has missed all 3 court appearances, in fact. As a result, the prosecution wouldn’t honor the plea agreement and the judge forced him to enter a blind plea. His court-appointed attorney just got out of jail last year. She was disbarred and jailed for taking her clients back to her house for drug-fueled sex parties and for harboring numerous fugitives at her house. When she got out of jail, she was readmitted to the bar and she was appointed as his attorney. It looks like we will be holding fundraisers to get him an attorney to try to deal with this mess.
Caramba!