Firearms Owners Against Crime
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
MENLO PARK, CALIF -(Ammoland.com)- In the past, politicians accused Facebook of allowing foreign intervention in the Presidential elections. Democrats claimed that in 2016, Russia ran advertisements and shared fake news on Facebook to help Donald Trump get elected to the Oval Office.
To combat these accusations, Facebook introduced a “trusted fact-checkers” program to rid the platform of the spread of fake news. This new program leads to the question of the identity of these so-called “unbiased” fact-checkers.
Who is fact-checking the fact-checkers, and could foreign media outlets use their trusted status with Facebook to block information damning to the Biden campaign from seeing the light of day?
These fact-checkers include American news media sources such as the Associated Press and websites like factcheck.org. While most of the fact-checkers partnered with Facebook to prevent false information from being disseminated are US based, that doesn’t mean all of them are American companies or groups. These non-American media organizations are allowed to “fact check” posts about the election and the candidates running for office.
One of the non-American fact-checkers that is part of the Facebook program is the Agence France-Presse (AFP). The AFP is the world’s oldest news service, but it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have an anti-gun agenda. The AFP tends to fact-check articles about guns and gun laws, and have quickly gained a reputation of marking post about Second Amendment as false even though they are decidely accurate. It could be that the foreign press agency doesn’t understand firearms, or that they have ulterior motives.
Recently writers such as Rachel Malone and Cam Edwards had articles marked as “fake news” by the AFP on the Facebook platform even though the reports were accurate and provided undeniable evidence.
The articles in question dealt with Vice Presidential Candidate Kamala Harris’s history of opposing the individual’s right to bear arms. The AFP marked the articles as “fake” any time anyone shared either article to their timeline. The Facebook block would then redirect readers to Agence France-Presse (AFP)'s own article, stating that Harris believes in the Second Amendment and an individual’s right to bear arms. Stealing legitimate viewer traffic from American news organizations.
The issue with this statement is that it is easily verifiable as false. With only a few minutes spent on Google, I was able to turn up an amicus brief that Harris filed with The US Supreme Court in support of DC’s handgun ban during the landmark District of Columbia v. Heller case.
Amici Curiae Brief by Kamala D. Harris in District of Columbia v. Heller
At the time, Harris was the Attorney General of California. She and several other AGs from around the country wrote a brief arguing that the Second Amendment did not apply to the average citizen, but only to “the militia.” The AGs wrote that DC could ban handguns in the city if they saw fit. SCOTUS sided with Dick Heller in the case and confirmed that the Second Amendment did indeed apply to the full citizenship.
Harris never changed her views on the Second Amendment, as evident in the proposed Biden/Harris take-your-guns plan.
The AFP has been silent about the misinformation. AmmoLand News reached out to the AFP to point out their obvious mistake in marking the articles as false. The AFP did not respond to our request for corrections. The AFP still has it listed as “false” on their fact check site.
Foreign Interference In The Presidential Election
Does this rise to the level of foreign interference in the presidential election? Only the FEC can decide that, but AmmoLand News encourages Congress to look into international news organization’s powers to sway votes by preventing the factual decimation of information about a candidate’s past. More to come on the FEC's involvement.
The AFP is also using search engine optimization techniques to push their false story about Harris supporting the individual’s right to firearms to the top search result when searching for “Kamala Harris heller.” This discovery leads one to wonder if they are aware that their fact check site is pushing out false information.
Journalists Banned
I reached out to Facebook for a comment on the story on behalf of AmmoLand News. Instead of responding, Facebook banned me for life from the Social Media platform and deleted my public page. Rachel Malone’s article, as of this writing, is no longer marked false.
Readers who followed me previously on Facebook are now encouraged to follow my webpage at crumpy.com, which will be my portfolio hub and my YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/johncrump2.
About John Crump
John is an NRA instructor and a constitutional activist. John has written extensively on the patriot movement including 3%'ers, Oath Keepers, and Militias In addition to the Patriot movement, John has written about firearms, interviewed people of all walks of life, and on the Constitution. He can be followed on Twitter at @crumpyss, on YouTube at johncrump2, or at www.crumpy.com.