Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, announced this week that it will cease its collusion with the faux “fact check” industry, which has served to censor truthful information with the aim of facilitating the unchallenged propagation of government-approved disinformation.
The official disinformation has been aimed at manufacturing Americans’ consent for various political agendas, including the authoritarian lockdown madness and the “public health” establishment’s policy goal of maintaining high vaccination rates.
In its statement, Meta acknowledged that its “fact check” policies have been “limiting legitimate political debate”. It also said that ostensible “mistakes” and “mission creep” arising from the means by which its policies have been enforced had resulted in admitted “censorship” on its platforms.
Additionally, Meta tacitly acknowledged how it has been manipulating its algorithms to limit the reach of posts about political topics. From now on, Meta said, it will take “a more personalized approach so that people who want to see more political content in their feeds can.”
In other words, Meta will cease manipulating its own algorithms to prevent people from having access to information that they want to know; instead, it will allow its algorithms to work as originally intended to deliver what people want to see in their feeds.
Instead of plastering posts with “fact check” labels that frequently misidentify factually accurate reporting as “misinformation”, Facebook will adopt the “community notes” model already used on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Meta also announced that it is moving its “trust and safety teams” responsible for writing content policies out of California, which has arguably demonstrated the most authoritarian tendencies of any state in the Union, and into Texas and other US locations.
The statement says that these changes are “an attempt to return to the commitment to free expression” that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg pledged in a speech at Georgetown University in 2019.
In August 2024, Zuckerberg admitted in a letter to Congress that Facebook had censored factual information under pressure from the Biden administration.
In a video statement accompanying Meta’s announcement this week, Zuckerberg similarly admitted that there has been “too much censorship” on Meta’s platforms and that the company will “get rid of fact checkers” because they “have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created”.
He also announced Meta’s intention to “work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more.”
This marks a shift from the efforts by the Biden administration to censor free speech, Zuckerberg further indicated, saying that efforts to fight the censorship have “been so difficult over the past four years” because “the US government has pushed for censorship by going after US and other American companies”—which had “emboldened other governments” around the world to also crack down on dissenting voices.
Meta indicated that the timeline for full implementation of these changes is “a few weeks”.
This very positive development came less than 24 hours after the organization Children’s Health Defense (CHD) filed a petition with the US Supreme Court to hear its censorship lawsuit against Facebook and its so-called “fact check” partners.
Originally named the World Mercury Project, CHD was established by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in collaboration with parents of vaccine-injured children, and he served as chairman of its board until recently stepping down as a result of his nomination by President Donald Trump to head the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
As CHD’s CEO Mary Holland pointed out,
In his announcement, Zuckerberg admitted Facebook had “gone too far” with its “fact-checking.” No kidding. In court documents in our lawsuit, Facebook admitted to censoring posts the company knew to be truthful and factually accurate. And it admits that it often did so under pressure from the US government!
CHD first filed its lawsuit against Meta, then still operating under the name Facebook Inc., on August 17, 2020, in a San Francisco Federal Court. On November 13, 2020, CHD filed an amended complaint against defendants Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, Science Feedback, and the Poynter Institute.
The suit essentially accuses Meta of defaming CHD and maliciously damaging its fundraising efforts on fraudulent grounds arising from Facebook’s partnership with faux “fact check” organizations that serve vested political and financial interests, and at the behest of the US government.
This makes it a free speech issue, as opposed to simply a matter of a private company enforcing its own terms of use, since the government has violated the US Constitution by pressuring Facebook to do what it is expressly prohibited from doing itself under the First Amendment.
Meta deplatformed CHD from Facebook and Instagram in August 2022. In her statement this week on Meta’s announcement, Mary Holland welcomed the development while adding,
But it ain’t over yet. The medical free speech battle won’t be won until CHD and everyone else who was unjustly kicked off and demonetized by Facebook and Instagram are reinstated to those platforms. That’s why we took our case against Facebook—dismissed by the lower courts—all the way to the US Supreme Court.
As a journalist who was exposing the censorship regime even before the COVID‑19 pandemic, including with freelance work for CHD, I played a small and indirect yet important role in this lawsuit.
The petition to the Supreme Court references a February 2019 letter from Congressman Adam Schiff, then a Democratic representative of California and now a Senator, to the respective CEOs of Facebook, Google, and Amazon demanding that they take action to prevent the spread of vaccine “misinformation”.
As illuminated in response letters to each of those companies that I authored on behalf of CHD, Schiff’s letter used the word “misinformation” euphemistically to mean any information, no matter how factual, that might lead parents to the conclusion that it is not in the best interest of their children’s health to strictly comply with the routine childhood vaccine schedule recommend by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
CHD’s petition to the Supreme Court repeatedly references and extensively quotes from the letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the full text of which was also attached as “Exhibit A”, which is described in the petition as having put Facebook “on notice” that it would be acting in bad faith if it were to adopt Schiff’s euphemistic use of “vaccine misinformation”—which is exactly what Facebook proceeded to do.
The petition also references three articles I wrote for CHD: “Why You Can’t Trust the CDC on Vaccines” (January 24, 2019), “CDC’s Infant Hep B Vaccine Recommendations — No Proof of Safety?” (March 26, 2019), and “CDC’s ‘Universal’ Recommendations for Infant Hep B Vaccine Not Based on Science, But Assumptions” (April 2, 2019).
The latter two are parts two and three of a three-part series I wrote for CHD illuminating how the CDC’s recommendation for all newborns to receive three-doses of HepB vaccine starting on the first day of their lives was premised not on any scientific or medical rationale but the policy goal of achieving higher vaccine uptake, thus placing the vast majority of infants at unnecessary risk of harm from this aluminum-containing pharmaceutical product. The first part was titled “CDC’s Recommendation for Hepatitis B Vaccination in Infants. More Risks Than Benefits?” (March 21, 2019), and the whole series is also available as a single article titled “Why Does the CDC Recommend Hepatitis B Vaccination for Infants?” (April 2, 2019).
In June 2020, CHD also published a freely downloadable e-book that I wrote on the topic of censorship titled How Censorship is Redefining Informed Consent as ‘Misinformation’, along with an accompanying article I wrote titled “CHD Responds to Accusation of Spreading ‘Misinformation’ on Facebook”.
I was prompted to do that work by media headlines in November 2019 falsely proclaiming that a study had found that CHD was the top spreader of “vaccine misinformation” on Facebook. I showed how, in fact, the study authors hadn’t even attempted to produce even a single example of an ad from CHD on Facebook that was false or misleading.
Instead, the study authors engaged in scientific fraud by adopting the standard euphemistic use of “misinformation”. They lazily dubbed any information that didn’t align with the CDC’s policy goal of achieving high vaccination rates as “anti-vaccine”, which they then lazily and fraudulently equated with “misinformation”.
Illuminating their own duplicity, the study authors cited a Facebook post from the organization Michigan for Vaccine Choice as an example of “misinformation”, even though the post ironically stated that its messages was “NOT ANTI-VACCINE”, and even though it literally made no claims about any vaccines; the post’s entire message was merely that every individual has a right to make their own informed choice about vaccinations.
Thus, the study authors instructively proclaimed that the mere act of advocating the right to informed consent constituted the spread of “vaccine misinformation”—an illuminating insight into the true nature of the medical authoritarianism being advanced by the censorship regime.
That study, published in the journal Vaccine, also illuminates how professional propagandists masquerade as “scientists” just as there are those who masquerade as “journalists”.
Another instructive example of this phenomenon in the medical literature was a so-called “study” in JAMA Open Network, a journal of the American Medical Association (AMA), in August 2023, which purported to determine what types of “misinformation” about COVID‑19 had been propagated by physicians in the US. Yet the study’s authors were themselves guilty of spreading disinformation about COVID‑19 and perpetrating scientific fraud by literally defining “misinformation” as any information that was contrary to that provided by the CDC.
Their adoption of this standard euphemism led the study authors to falsely and preposterously maintain, for example, that the mRNA COVID‑19 vaccines were effective at stopping infection and transmission of the virus.
The vaccines were, of course, sold to the public on the basis of that willful lie, and efforts by myself and others to inform the public how that claim was unsupported by scientific evidence were met with censorship.
But it was astonishing that so-called “scientists” would still be pretending as though that original claim had proved true even in August 2023, long after it had been acknowledged that the vaccines did not prevent infection and transmission of the virus.
Former CDC director Rochelle Walensky, for instance, admitted in March 2022 that they made that claim not because they had evidence for it but because they were “hopeful” the vaccines would work that way, and they simply never considered the possibility that the protection conferred by the vaccine would wane so rapidly.
Former White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Deborah Birx similarly admitted to Congress in July 2022 that their false claims were based not on science but “hope”.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) who also served as Chief Medical Advisor to the President, had also lied that the vaccines would stop infection and transmission even though they weren’t expected to do so because they weren’t designed to, as Fauci finally admitted in an article published in the journal Cell Host & Microbe in January 2023.
Similar examples abound of Facebook censoring factual information in service to the government and, by extension, the pharmaceutical industry; but to cite just one particularly illuminating example, an April 2021 Facebook policy update literally prohibited users from telling the truth that the mRNA COVID‑19 vaccines “had not been approved” by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
At the time, the FDA’s own “Fact Sheet for Recipients and Caregivers”, which health care providers were supposed to provide to patients prior to vaccination in order to acquire patients’ informed consent, explicitly stated that “There is no US Food and Drug administration (FDA) approved vaccine to prevent COVID‑19.”
The vaccines were instead administered under “Emergency Use Authorization” (EUA), a regulatory status for products still considered “investigational” or “experimental”. As the FDA’s Fact Sheet for both Pfizer’s and Moderna’s products noted, the respective mRNA COVID‑19 vaccine “has not undergone the same type of review as an FDA-approved or cleared product.”
It wasn’t until August 2021 that the FDA finally granted approval and licensure to the mRNA COVID‑19 vaccines, but that didn’t stop federal and state government officials, prior to that time, from brazenly lying to the public that these experimental products developed using gene therapy technology had been FDA “approved”.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, for instance, during a press briefing on July 16, 2020, explained how the Biden administration had been working with Facebook to flag ostensible “misinformation” and “disinformation”. Illustrating her own euphemistic use of those terms, Psaki proceeded to give the example of people she accused of “falsely alleging that mRNA vaccines are untested and thus risky, even though many of them are approved and have gone through the gold standard of the FDA approval process.”
Setting aside her use of the word “many” to describe the two mRNA vaccines being administered under EUA status, Psaki was thus herself guilty of spreading disinformation by falsely claiming they had been FDA approved.
Ironically, she went on to argue that if someone spreads misinformation on one platform, they ought to be banned from all social media. Hence, according to its own standard, the White House ought to have been banned from all social media platforms for spreading dangerous vaccine disinformation.
Here in Michigan, where I reside, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services was likewise brazenly lying to the public that the vaccines had been “approved” by the FDA just the same as the measles vaccine and every other licensed vaccine on the market.
Following this cue from the state government, notwithstanding the FDA’s Fact Sheet for Recipients and Caregivers, health care providers like McLaren Health Care, Munson Healthcare, and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan got in on the grand deception by lying to their patients that the shots were “approved”.
This is just one illustration of how individuals’ right to informed consent was systematically violated under a regime of medical tyranny, and how Facebook’s censorship of truth rendered the company complicit in this crime against humanity.
In addition to my numerous articles and newsletters on the topic, on The Tom Woods Show in February 2021, I detailed how Facebook’s faux “fact checking” on COVID‑19 was censoring true information to help the government propagate its disinformation campaigns about virtually everything Covid-related. I joined Woods again on his show in September 2022 to further discuss how the “fact-checker” scam was being used to advance the authoritarian political agenda.
Meta’s announcement that it was ending its collusion in the censorship of truth was naturally met with weeping and gnashing of teeth by the faux “fact check” industry and the legacy mainstream media, which have gone on pretending as though “misinformation” in this context hasn’t consistently been used as a euphemism for any information, no matter how factual, that does not align with the various political agendas that they have opted to serve by masquerading political propaganda as “journalism”.
LinkedIn, meanwhile, has yet to get with the program and persists in violating its own User Agreement with a bad-faith interpretation of its community guidelines whereby its prohibition of so-called “misinformation” means that journalists like myself are forbidden from sharing factually accurate information if it does not align with the policy aims of “public health authorities”.
In the latest example, just yesterday, I was notified by LinkedIn that it had removed a post of mine from the day before, which it did on the verifiably false grounds that my post violated their prohibition of “misinformation”. My true offense was having accurately reported the easily verifiable fact that a study done in an FDA lab had confirmed that mRNA COVID‑19 vaccines are contaminated with DNA from the manufacturing process at levels exceeding the FDA’s own safety limit.
Similarly, in September 2023, LinkedIn censored a post of mine for containing the link to a factually accurate report by Maryanne Demasi, PhD, about the finding of DNA contamination in COVID‑19 vaccines.
In fact, although I ultimately managed to get my account back, I was “permanently” banned by LinkedIn in 2022 for the grave sin of accurately reporting how the CDC’s August 2021 lie that natural immunity to SARS‑CoV‑2 was inferior to that conferred by mRNA COVID‑19 vaccines was contradicted at the time by virtually all the non-CDC-originating medical literature and subsequently falsified by the CDC’s own data as reported by its own researchers in its own MMWR journal.
In essence, LinkedIn has repeatedly penalized me for the crime of heresy against the vaccine religion.
Cross-posted from JeremyRHammond.com.
