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An infamous anti-vaccine organization led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. filed a lawsuit in a California federal court, alleging that Facebook’s data verification program for federal or medical data violates its constitutional rights.
Children’s Health Defense alleges in its lawsuit (PDF) that Facebook, its CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Science Feedback, Poynter and PolitiFact performed “together or in concert with federal agencies” to violate CHD’s First and Fifth Amendment rights. The lawsuit also alleges that Facebook and fact-checking organizations agreed to dedicate electronic fraud to “clarifying the scope” of vaccine ads. As the anti-vax movement gets weirder and stupider, Facebook announces repression
Facebook has “insidious conflicts with the pharmaceutical industry and its captive fitness agencies,” CHD said in a press release. “Facebook is lately censoring the Children’s Health Defense page, its purge is opposed to factual data on vaccines, 5G and public fitness agencies.”
“This is a case in which the First Amendment tests the limits of government authority to braishly censor unwanted complaints about government policies and prescription drugs and telecommunications on personal Internet platforms,” Kennedy said in a written statement.
Kennedy, through CHD and an affiliated organization called the World Mercury Project, was guilty of more than all the classified vaccine ads on Facebook when they were allowed, researchers discovered last year. It ended in 2019 amid a measles outbreak, when Facebook updated its policies following pressure from the Centers for Disease Control and lawmakers.
Ads promoting false statements about vaccines have been banned, and pages and teams that advertise incorrect information or misleading vaccines have their content replaced in studies and recommendations. Vaccine posts may also be included in Facebook’s data verification procedure and will in all likelihood include an additional link to direct readers to information sites such as the World Health Organization. Right-handers say Twitter’s ‘bias’ that opposes them is illegal
Facebook’s data verification movements violate CHD’s rights and are also defamatory, the organization says. The organization’s reputation “depends on the credibility of its clinical articles,” CHD writes in demand, “exploring the known and recently unknown public fitness hazards of vaccines and 5G and wireless technology.”
Essentially, the 115-page complaint argues that Facebook’s movements amount to censorship and defamation because CHD likes its content to be classified as misinformation.
Facebook “has incorporated WHO and CDC definitions of ‘vaccine deception’ into algorithms and learning devices through which they have known the content of coronary heart disease, which is reported simply because it criticizes those same agencies for being ‘biased’, ‘unreliable’ and ‘obsolete’, complains about the lawsuit, adding that Facebook and fact-checking have agreed to ‘describe [CHD content] as ‘ false ‘ when critical of the lawsuit vaccine or 5G network protection, wearing this censorship through simulated machinations of “moderator content” and “independent fact checkers”.”
These movements have “already harmed” CHD, claims the demand, “and will have the effect of further harming [CHD] by damaging the reputation of their advertising and their customers, as well as that of [their] authors, by diverting traffic from their and further cutting their income and donations.” Trump desperately seeks to punish big technologies but doesn’t have a smart way to do it
If Facebook’s movements have well depreciated CHD’s anti-vaccine content and diverted attention, as demand claims, then their systems are working exactly as expected. But CHD quoted a tough best friend in his opposing quest for those systems: the White House.
In May, President Donald Trump signed an executive order on “saving him from online censorship.” The order, while absolutely inapplicable, calls on regulators to prevent social media companies, adding Facebook, from executing “to suppress prospects with which they disagree.”
There are so many things one can “disagree” with the facts; Earth remains circular (and its climate changes) whether it is or not. Historically, however, Facebook has struggled to walk in that direction and separate the “fact” from “opinion” in its fact-checking process, especially when someone with an audience shouts “partiality.”
In July, for example, informants discovered that Facebook classifying the climate replaces denial on the basis of false accusations as an “opinion” and exempting it from the fact-checking process, even though staff agreed to it in partly falsely.
CHD in the lawsuit argued that its anti-vaccine content should also be treated as an opinion, as should climate change denial. “Using Facebook’s preloaded features to mislabel [CHD], Science Feedback, and Facebook deliberately tells the public that the applicant presents fake data, even if they know that the data presented is, at most, an opinion and not a false fact,” CHD said.
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