FAKE NEWS EXPOSED: A Service of PoliticalChat.com

[whell]

Originally Posted by finnbow

What you continue to conveniently overlook is that the laptop story had already been proferred by Guiliani (under investigation at the time for FISA violations with Russia-leaning Ukrainians) and Derkach in Ukraine (a Russian intelligence agent subsequently indicted by the Feds who was under investigation for helping "to orchestrate a wide-ranging plan to meddle in the 2020 presidential campaign, including using Rudolph W. Giuliani to spread their misleading claims about President Biden and tilt the election in Donald J. Trump's favor.").



In other words, the people behind this story were a guy now being disbarred for lying to American courts about the 2020 election and a Russian spy indicted for conspiracy to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Acts (IEEPA), bank fraud , and money laundering.



Accordingly, this story was viewed with extreme (and deserved) skepticism by everyone (including Fox News and the WSJ) and the only person willing to write an article about the unverified and sketchy allegations for the (slimy) NYPost was a former Hannity staffer (and current Breitbart scribe). And you feel that a private company was under some sort of legal obligation to link to it, particularly after Trump solicited and received Russian help in 2016 (in large part via social media)? You seem to have a profound misunderstanding of the First Amendment and a lot of unwarranted trust in Rudy and his Russian spy buddy.

None of which is relevant to the FBI's "warning" about the story, and the platform's willingness to "punish" those who linked to it or retweeted it. You might not like the story, and you might not like the folks who were pushing the story. They had the "right" to use the social media platforms within the terms or services of those platforms, which they did.

I keep repeating myself here, so for the last time: the FBI had no business meeting with those platforms weekly to assure that certain information was "censored by proxy". That's not the FBI's job. Further, since the posts did not violate the terms of service of those platforms, as those platforms now admit, they had no business restricting content posted by those users, making those users more difficult to find in a search, or suspending or canceling those accounts.

Sure, they may not have specifically violated any laws in doing so, and I suspect a Section 230 violation might be difficult to prove. Section 230, however, doesn't allow for those platforms to censor or restrict content that otherwise conforms to the platforms' terms of service. Clearly, they did that.