Leftist ‘Disinformation’ Police Pressure Meta To Run Election Interference On New Threads Platform
A coalition of left-wing organizations is urging Meta (formerly Facebook) to create a strategy to tackle election "disinformation" on its newly launched Threads platform.
Vote.org, a left-wing group focused on boosting Democratic voter turnout, led nearly a dozen Democrat-aligned organizations in sending a letter to Meta. The letter requested the company to develop strong election policies for Threads, emphasizing that the platform should not allow the spread of baseless conspiracies and unverified information. They criticized YouTube and Twitter for permitting election disinformation on their platforms.
To justify their call for increased monitoring of alleged "disinformation," Vote.org cited the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot and the enactment of election integrity laws by state legislatures, which they falsely labeled as "voter suppression laws," as examples of the consequences of weak protections for "election integrity."
The letter acknowledged that Facebook has already devoted resources to its election policies and urged Threads to do the same.
Additionally, Vote.org and other signatory organizations sought to insert themselves into Meta's decision-making process. They demanded access to any information regarding the company's proposed or existing policies related to election integrity, disinformation, voting, and elections. They also offered to hold meetings with company officials to provide input and recommendations on these matters.
Other left-wing groups that co-signed the letter included End Citizens United, Public Wise, and When We All Vote.
Despite displaying quotes from Presidents Ronald Reagan and Franklin Roosevelt on its homepage, Vote.org has a documented history of left-wing activism. For instance, the group publicly supported the House Democrats' "For the People Act" (HR 1) in March 2021, a bill that aimed to solidify certain voting practices used in the 2020 election into federal law and grant federal government oversight of the electoral process.
Vote.org also opposed a Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling in July 2022, which deemed the use of ballot drop boxes as a violation of state law, asserting that the decision contradicted the promise of democracy. The group also criticized Tennessee Republicans for expelling two Democrat colleagues from the state legislature after they joined a left-wing mob that disrupted proceedings at the capitol. Notably, the group did not condemn the actions of the left-wing rioters involved in the "siege" of the capitol.
The discussion also brings attention to how Big Tech employed online policing of "disinformation" and "misinformation" as a pretext to interfere in the 2020 presidential election. For example, after the New York Post published a significant story about Hunter Biden's laptop shortly before the 2020 election, platforms like Twitter and Facebook took measures to censor and limit the story's spread.
Twitter users were not allowed to share the story, even through direct messages, and the platform removed links and flagged the story as potentially "unsafe." Facebook also reduced the story's distribution, pending verification by third-party fact-checkers. The FBI played a significant role in these platforms' suppression of the story, despite authenticating the laptop as early as November 2019. The FBI warned Twitter and Facebook to watch out for "Russian propaganda" and "hack-and-leak operations" by state actors leading up to the election.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted during a podcast interview with Joe Rogan that Facebook's decision to suppress the story was influenced by the FBI's warning.
