ThinkProgress alleges censorship after its story on Kavanaugh's approach to abortion was deemed “false” by the Weekly Standard, a Facebook fact-checking partner
With help from John Hendel and Ashley Gold YouTube : A Shrubbery !!!! — Nicolas B. Tweets: Will Oremus / @willoremus : Facebook enlisting an avowedly conservative outlet to unilaterally “fact-check” liberal outlets on questions of how to interpret Kavanaugh's abortion statements is deeply misguided. https://thinkprogress.org/... Dan Froomkin / @froomkin : Don't blame Facebook or Zuckerberg for this travesty. Facebook outsourced its fact-checking to the International Fact-Checking Network, @factchecknet @Poynter, which granted the @weeklystandard full accreditation. https://www.theguardian.com/ ... https://twitter.com/... Ben Smith / @buzzfeedben : My issues with the professionalization of fact-checking are longstanding and aren't ideological — the issue is that it's just a pseudoscientific label for journalism. And Facebook is inheriting a hard problem. https://www.politico.com/... https://twitter.com/... Ryan Grim / @ryangrim : I hope Think Progress sues Facebook for this https://thinkprogress.org/... Dominic Holden / @dominicholden : Jeff Sessions is meeting with state attorneys general on Sept. 25 to discuss the how social media platforms are ostensibly unfair to conservatives, but this seems a clear example of how Facebook caters to conservatives and subverts progressives. https://thinkprogress.org/... Will Oremus / @willoremus : It's clear Facebook shouldn't be blocking ThinkProgress opinion pieces whose headlines The Weekly Standard finds misleading. The flimsy defense of “balance” doesn't hold water when you realize there is no corresponding liberal outlet on Facebook's fact-checking roster. Ryan Grim / @ryangrim : So Facebook has given the Weekly Standard the power to drive liberal news outlets into the ground and the Weekly Standard is now wielding it https://thinkprogress.org/... Will Oremus / @willoremus : If this were a straight news story, you could make a case that the headline is somewhere between “Half True” and “Mostly False.” But this isn't a news story; the author is making an argument. So “fact-checking” the headline seems like a category error. https://thinkprogress.org/... Judd Legum / @juddlegum : Facebook censored ThinkProgress because the Weekly Standard told them to https://thinkprogress.org/... Kira Lerner / @kira_lerner : In a healthy news environment, both @thinkprogress and @weeklystandard cover the Kavanaugh hearings. In a dystopian news environment, a tech giant tells @weeklystandard to censor @thinkprogress' coverage of the hearings. Guess which we're living in? https://thinkprogress.org/... Cristian Farias / @cristianafarias : Just last night, I read and shared the article about Brett Kavanaugh's views on Roe v. Wade that Facebook censored @thinkprogress over. The censorship in and of itself is troubling. That the @weeklystandard had a say in the censorship is beyond the pale. https://thinkprogress.org/... Ben Smith / @buzzfeedben : This is all going well https://thinkprogress.org/... See also Mediagazer