Report: Facebook manually censored NY Post Biden corruption bombshell

A report published this week alleges that Facebook manually censored the New York Post bombshell story about Biden family corruption.  According to the Guardian, Facebook moderators manually overrode the platform’s automatic processes to censor the Post, an effort that successfully censored about half of the engagement the article would have received, according to researchers.

(Article by Tom Ciccotta republished from Breitbart.com)

According to a report by the Guardian, internal documents from Facebook suggest that the platform intentionally restricted the distribution of a New York Post report that allegedly revealed ties between Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and a Ukrainian energy company. The suppression was not automatic or based on Facebook’s AI and algorithmic approach to content, but rather done by hand by Facebook moderators.

This does not come as a surprise as some Facebook executives announced their decision to restrict the distribution of the report. In a tweet, Facebook’s Policy Communications Director Andy Stone said that the story would be restricted in some form on the platform.

“While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want be clear that this story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform,” Stone wrote in a tweet on October 14.

While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want be clear that this story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook's third-party fact checking partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform.

— Andy Stone (@andymstone) October 14, 2020

According to an internal Facebook policy, the platform will remove “unverified rumors” that could lead to violence, harm, or voter interference. It is not clear how this policy is applied by Facebook.

“Generally, we take action on misinformation rated by fact-checking partners by reducing its spread and surfacing more information to people,” the policy reads. “However, we will remove misinformation if it violates our Community Standards, including misinformation and unverified rumors that could contribute to the risk of imminent violence or physical harm, voter and census interference content, and certain manipulated videos…”

Facebook’s censorship of the Post was deemed successful by social media engagement experts that examined the decision. They found that the Post‘s bombshell article only reached about half the engagement it would have been expected to reach on its own. Mark Zuckerberg denied censoring the Post during his recent testimony to the Senate Commerce Committee.

Breitbart News reported over the weekend that Twitter has finally reinstated the Twitter account belonging to the New York Post. The newspaper was locked out of their account on October 14 following the publication of the Hunter Biden story.

Stay tuned to Breitbart News for more updates on this story.

Read more at: Breitbart.com