Facebook Bans Criticism of Kamala Harris Policies…

by Sharon Rondeau, h/t DG

(Oct. 26 2024) — On Friday afternoon Substack writer and P&E contributor Dennis Gladden reported on his Facebook page that the platform removed a link he posted to a letter to the editor we published Wednesday.

Primarily a writer on faith and the Bible, Gladden departed from his customary genre and expressed his decision not to support Kamala Harris in the November 5 presidential election.

“Well, Facebook just took down my post and the associated comments regarding ‘Harris’s New Way Forward Is No Way for Me,'” Gladden wrote. “It was a link to my letter published at The Post & Email. I’ve asked for a review, but I don’t hold out much hope. A response can take up to four days. How long before links to my Substack posts become unsuitable?”

While critical of Harris’s policies, Gladden did not raise the question of Harris’s eligibility to serve as vice president or president as a “natural born Citizen,” as Article II of the U.S. Constitution requires and on which numerous P&E writers have recently posted.

Gladden’s letter begins:

When someone, especially one who can influence how my family lives, says they are progressive, they have my attention. I am all for advancement.

Kamala Harris is the progressive candidate in the 2024 election, the champion of A New Way Forward. So I ask her, as I would any progressive: What is the destination? Where will your new way take us?

He opined that if elected, Harris would promote “a culture where anything goes, even more than it already does. It seems that rather than preserve the Constitution she would swear to uphold, Harris would overhaul it to her liking.”

In an email to this writer Saturday, Gladden said Facebook “allowed” the link to remain in place for “nearly two days” prior to removing it. “A couple of followers tried sharing the link on their pages, and Facebook immediately removed it,” he added.

Gladden joins the ranks of P&E contributors Robert C. Laity and CDR Charles F. Kerchner, Jr. (Ret), whose article links Facebook also removed over the last three months, though the latter writers posted “eligibility”-themed material when Gladden did not.

On Friday, The Western Journal reported that outlets attempting to publish “fair coverage of various Biden-Harris administration and Harris campaign scandals” were censored by Facebook “in recent weeks.”

“Though Meta (Facebook’s parent company) has a history of working with the Biden administration to censor dissenting voices,” TWJ added, “in July the company claimed it would be refraining from election-related censorship going into the 2024 election. It’s unclear, however, if Facebook is holding true to that promise.”

Just two months ago, Facebook’s parent company, Meta, through CEO Mark Zuckerberg, issued an admission to the House Judiciary Committee that Facebook felt “pressured” “for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration when we didn’t agree…” despite the platform’s declared goal of “promoting speech and helping people connect in a safe and secure way.”

“I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,” Zuckerberg wrote to Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH4) and ranking member Jerrold Nadler (D-NY12). “I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today…”

Google, too, employs the same censorship as Facebook, Kerchner alleged on August 6 from firsthand experience and contemporaneous screenshots.

The intent, Kerchner wrote, was to influence “election results” and obscure “the true meaning of constitutional terms such as ‘natural born Citizen‘ of the United States.”

On March 21, scientist and “Popular Rationalism” author James Lyons-Weiler, PhD, wrote:

WHEN FACEBOOK, YOUTUBE, and TWITTER started censoring people asking questions and having “unfettered” conversations about vaccines and public health policies, I jumped into action and held three live, well-attended conferences on censorship. The attendees and presenters all came away with a deeper appreciation of the importance of the marketplace of ideas, the right of people to wrong, and the truly sacred and central role of the First Amendment.

EVERYTHING about the future hinges on our ability to share open discourse about things that matter.

On February 28 of this year as well as on several earlier occasions, U.S. Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) held a roundtable on the topic of “Federal Health Agencies and the COVID Cartel: What Are They Hiding?”

One of the speakers, independent journalist Lara Logan, formerly of CBS and Fox Nation, remarked:

While propaganda and censorship are not new, technology means unprecedented power and reach in the hands of a few companies like Facebook, Instagram, and Google. As you have heard many times today, they have been allowed to amass monopoly power. And as a result, they not only reach billions of people across the world every second of the day, they have absolute control over what we see and what we hear…