Facebook Censorship of P&E story on Kamala Harris Eligibility

by Sharon Rondeau, h/t RCL

(Jul. 23, 2024) — On Tuesday morning, constitutional activist and longtime reader Robert C. Laity reported an article recently published at The Post & Email regarding Kamala Harris’s eligibility for the presidency was removed by Facebook.

The article, written by another constitutional activist, CDR Charles F. Kerchner, Jr. (Ret), and reposted with permission by The P&E, is titled, “Kamala Harris Got Away With It As VP – She Should Not Be Allowed to Get Away With It As The Commander In Chief – Trump Should Challenge Her Constitutional Eligibility.”

“Facebook is at it again!” Laity wrote to us early Tuesday morning, along with an attachment evidencing Facebook’s action.

“We removed your post,” the message states. “…You’ll hear back from us soon.”

As for the reason, Facebook proffered, “It looks like [sic] you tried to get likes, follows, shares or video views in a misleading way.”

On October 20, 2020, The Post & Email reported a similar encounter Laity experienced with Facebook:

Constitutional activist and P&E reader Robert C. Laity reported Tuesday morning that Facebook would not allow him to post a link to our article published Monday titled, “U.S. Senator Claims ‘Birthright Citizenship’ Renders Harris Eligible.”

Below Laity’s most recent Facebook post consisting solely of the article link from The P&E, Facebook elucidated, “This goes against our Community Standards on Spam” with a link to the “Rule.”

According to Meta, Facebook’s parent company, the “Community Standards” consist of:

Every day, people use Facebook to share their experiences, connect with friends and family, and build communities. It’s a service for more than 2 billion people to freely express themselves across countries and cultures and in dozens of languages.

Meta recognizes how important it is for Facebook to be a place where people feel empowered to communicate, and we take our role seriously in keeping abuse off the service. That’s why we developed standards for what is and isn’t allowed on Facebook.

These standards are based on feedback from people and the advice of experts in fields like technology, public safety and human rights. To ensure everyone’s voice is valued, we take great care to create standards that include different views and beliefs, especially from people and communities that might otherwise be overlooked or marginalized.

…Our commitment to voice

The goal of our Community Standards is to create a place for expression and give people a voice. Meta wants people to be able to talk openly about the issues that matter to them, whether through written comments, photos, music, or other artistic mediums, even if some may disagree or find them objectionable. In some cases, we allow content—which would otherwise go against our standards—if it’s newsworthy and in the public interest. We do this only after weighing the public interest value against the risk of harm, and we look to international human rights standards to make these judgments. In other cases, we may remove content that uses ambiguous or implicit language when additional context allows us to reasonably understand that the content goes against our standards.

Our commitment to expression is paramount, but we recognize the internet creates new and increased opportunities for abuse. For these reasons, when we limit expression, we do it in service of one or more of the following values:

The “Spam” designation reads:

Policy Rationale

We do not allow content that is designed to deceive, mislead, or overwhelm users in order to artificially increase viewership. This content detracts from people’s ability to engage authentically on our platforms and can threaten the security, stability and usability of our services. We also seek to prevent abusive tactics, such as spreading deceptive links to draw unsuspecting users in through misleading functionality or code, or impersonating a trusted domain.

Online spam is a lucrative industry. Our policies and detection must constantly evolve to keep up with emerging spam trends and tactics. In taking action to combat spam, we seek to balance raising the costs for its producers and distributors on our platforms, with protecting the vibrant, authentic activity of our community.

Clicking the “More” button yields a list of prohibited activity, including “Sharing deceptive or misleading URLs, domains, or applications,” under which fall “Like/share-gating”; Deceptive redirect behavior”; “Cloaking” and “Deceptive landing page functionality,” among others.

Facebook has a process through which a user can appeal a “content decision,” which directs him or her to the “Oversight Board Reference Number.” “If you do not see this message then you are not currently eligible to appeal a decision to the Oversight Board,” the policy states.

During the 2020 election, Facebook and YouTube, the latter of which is owned by Google, banned any discussion of “presidential eligibility” in regard to any candidate. In the case of YouTube, the ban was declared policy, celebrated in an editorial disguised as a news item by the Associated Press.

“Better late than never, YouTube is making clear there will be no ‘birtherism’ on its platform during this year’s U.S. presidential election,” wrote the AP‘s Matt O’Brien. “Nevermind [sic] that the conspiracy theory around former President Barack Obama’s citizenship emerged in 2008 and has not been a widespread issue since he last ran for president in 2012.”

In August 2020, Biden chose Harris to be his running-mate. Shortly thereafter, then-Chapman University Law Professor John C. Eastman opined that as a child born to two non-U.S.-citizen parents, Harris is not a “natural born Citizen” as is required by Article II, Section 1, clause 5 of the U.S. Constitution and the 12th Amendment.

“The fact that Senator Kamala Harris has just been named the vice presidential running mate for presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has some questioning her eligibility for the position,” Eastman wrote. “The 12th Amendment provides that ‘no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.’ And Article II of the Constitution specifies that ‘[n]o person except a natural born citizen…shall be eligible to the office of President.’ Her father was (and is) a Jamaican national, her mother was from India, and neither was a naturalized U.S. citizen at the time of Harris’ birth in 1964. That, according to these commentators, makes her not a ‘natural born citizen’—and therefore ineligible for the office of the president and, hence, ineligible for the office of the vice president.”

Moreover, he wrote, as foreign citizens, her parents might not have fallen under the “jurisdiction” of the United States, a phrase many omit when quoting the 14th Amendment, further calling into question Harris’s basic U.S. citizenship, let alone “natural born” status.

The language of Article II is that one must be a natural-born citizen. The original Constitution did not define citizenship, but the 14th Amendment does—and it provides that “all persons born…in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens.” Those who claim that birth alone is sufficient overlook the second phrase. The person must also be “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, and that meant subject to the complete jurisdiction, not merely a partial jurisdiction such as that which applies to anyone temporarily sojourning in the United States (whether lawfully or unlawfully). Such was the view of those who authored the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause; of the Supreme Court of the United States in the 1872 Slaughter-House Cases and the 1884 case of Elk v. Wilkins; of Thomas Cooley, the leading constitutional treatise writer of the day; and of the State Department, which, in the 1880s, issued directives to U.S. embassies to that effect.

As a result of his status of an adviser to Trump with the belief Trump won the controversial 2020 election, Eastman has been criminally prosecuted by Fulton County, GA District Attorney Fani Willis (D) and Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes (D) and was recommended for disbarment in California, a singular judicial decision Eastman appealed and was denied.

“Donald Trump lawyer John Eastman has been temporarily suspended from practicing law in the District of Columbia in response to a similar prohibition by a California judge,” Bloomberg Law reported in May. “…California State Bar Court Judge Yvette Roland on May 1 rejected Eastman’s attempt to lift his suspension in that state, saying his disbarment would ‘safeguard the public’ after he made false claims about the 2020 election. The California Supreme Court will make the final determination.”

Over a century ago, lifelong Democrat and Third Assistant Secretary of State during the Woodrow Wilson administration Breckinridge Long contended that former U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice and Chief Justice, former New York governor and Republican presidential challenger Charles Evans Hughes, born in Glens Falls, NY to a British-citizen father, was constitutionally ineligible to serve, writing in Chicago Legal News:

He was born in this country and is beyond question “native born.” But is there not a distinction between “native born” and “natural born”? At the time he was born his father and mother were subjects of England. His father had not then been naturalized. The day after Mr. Hughes was born his father had a right, as an English subject, to go to the British consul, at New York, and to present his wife and infant and to claim any assistance he might need from the consul as the representative of the English government.

If war had broken out between this government and England this government would have had a right to interne the father, the mother and the son as subjects of an enemy power.

The Constitution of the United States puts a particular qualification upon those who shall become President and Vice-President. For all other offices it requires that they be “citizens of the United States,” but for the Presidency and Vice-Presidency it requires that they be “Natural Born citizens.” The word “natural” means “of the nature of”; “naturally a part of”; “by the laws of nature an integral part of” a system. Following that line of thought, a “natural born” citizen would be one who was naturally, at his birth, a member of the political society; naturally, a part of the political system into which he was born; by the laws of nature a citizen of the society into which he was born. It would mean, further, that no other government had any claim upon him; that his sole allegiance was to the government into which he had been born and that that government was solely, at the time, responsible for his protection. “Native born” does not mean quite the same thing. He might be born in a country under conditions similar to the conditions under which Mr. Hughes was born, and subsequently become a citizen of that Country. In that case, after he became a citizen, he would be a “native born” citizen, but he would not have been a “natural born” citizen. From the instant of his birth this government would not be solely responsible for his protection.

Mr. Hughes was born before the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, so the status of his citizenship must be considered as under the laws existing prior to the time of the adoption of that Amendment.

Using Hughes’s analysis, Barack Hussein Obama and Harris are ineligible to the presidency.