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Facebook’s explanation for issues concerning sharing interviews with former President Donald Trump sounded an awful lot like “election interference.”

Shortly after Vice President Kamala Harris accepted her party’s nomination and the 2024 matchup was official, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted that the administration she was part of had pressured Facebook to censor Americans’ free speech.

Now, with less than two weeks until Election Day, calling up memories of the suppressed Hunter Biden laptop reporting from the New York Post, Outkick founder Clay Travis called out the social media platform after the outlet’s interviews with the president were experiencing “coding errors.”

“Facebook blocked all sharing of my interview with @realDonaldTrump & @PlanetTyrus’s @outkick interview with Trump too saying it violated ‘community standards.’ Facebook blamed ‘coding errors’ when contacted by us. Lies. Only Trump interviews were impacted,” he wrote on X, sharing a post from writer Bobby Burack.

A reader alerted Outkick that their attempt to post a link to the YouTube video of George “Tyrus” Murdoch interviewing Trump on Facebook ended with the message, “Your content couldn’t be shared because this goes against our Community Standards.”

After they attempted to share the link themselves, Outkick reached out to the platform’s parent company, Meta, and the “coding error” explanation that was supposedly fixed. left Burack asking the question, “Great, but why did it happen in the first place?”

“What was the ‘error?’ We asked Meta for a specific explanation as to what the error was that prevented users from sharing the Trump interview. After much back and forth, Meta finally said ‘their system was having issues with some links generated by third-party URL shorteners,’” which Outkick said they didn’t use.

When the same thing happened with Travis’ interview of Trump the “error” was fixed within hours of their notifying Meta.

“Interestingly, no such ‘errors’ seem to occur for YouTube links that direct users to interviews with Kamala Harris. As a test, we tried posting Harris’ recent sit down with ‘Call Her Daddy’ and Charlamagne tha God on Facebook. No problems,” added Burack.

The outlet concluded that the “errors” were “specifically targeted” at their coverage of the GOP leader as other YouTube videos of the president from recent weeks were readily shared on Facebook.

Not long after the Biden-Harris administration had begun, Travis testified before Congress in March 2021 that Facebook had “cut the reach of our articles by 70 percent” after he’d interviewed Trump on Aug. 11, 2020.

“The day after that interview, Facebook tanked our traffic,” a move he argued, “cost my company hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

Meanwhile, a decision was reported on Wednesday that Meta’s Oversight Board had overturned a ban from Facebook that had kept users from sharing a meme that replaced Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s faces with those of actors Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels on a poster for the film “Dumb and Dumber.”

On the laptop story in 2020, Zuckerberg said, “We’ve changed our policies and processes to make sure this doesn’t happen again — for instance, we no longer demote things in the U.S. while waiting for the fact-checkers.”

In the meantime, Outkick called on the CEO to intervene, investigate, and report to America what he discovered while Burack wrote, “Politically motivated censorship of election content is dangerous. It’s totalitarian. Literally. As any history buff would attest, censorship is the most vital tool of totalitarianism. A voter’s ability to properly educate themselves ahead of an election is severely weakened when the people in charge of the country’s most influential tech companies purposely limit the visibility of factual information, to the detriment of only one political party.”

Users on X agreed with the danger and were suspicious of the claim that the failed link was little more than an error.

Kevin Haggerty
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