Facebook has censored a Seymour Hersh story accusing the president of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy of embezzling funds by using a ‘fact-checker’ which is pro-Ukraine and funded by NATO.
The article headlined “Trading With the Enemy,” alleges Zelensky’s government has been “skimming untold millions from the American dollars earmarked for diesel fuel payments.”
From the article:
The Ukraine government, headed by Volodymyr Zelensky, has been using American taxpayers’ funds to pay dearly for the vitally needed diesel fuel that is keeping the Ukrainian army on the move in its war with Russia. It is unknown how much the Zelensky government is paying per gallon for the fuel, but the Pentagon was paying as much as $400 per gallon to transport gasoline from a port in Pakistan, via truck or parachute, into Afghanistan during the decades-long American war there.
What also is unknown is that Zelensky has been buying the fuel from Russia, the country with which it, and Washington, are at war, and the Ukrainian president and many in his entourage have been skimming untold millions from the American dollars earmarked for diesel fuel payments. One estimate by analysts from the Central Intelligence Agency put the embezzled funds at $400 million last year, at least; another expert compared the level of corruption in Kiev as approaching that of the Afghan war, “although there will be no professional audit reports emerging from the Ukraine.”
“Zelensky’s been buying discount diesel from the Russians,” one knowledgeable American intelligence official told me. “And who’s paying for the gas and oil? We are. Putin and his oligarchs are making millions” on it.
When Facebook users attempt to post the article, they are met with a warning label that says the piece is “false information” and has been “checked by independent fact-checkers.”
Unsurprisingly, the ‘fact checker’ in question is anything but independent, it is a pro-Ukraine group “partly funded by Foreign Offices of two NATO countries.”
So what is the fact check?
Well, the only reason why Facebook have deemed the Ukraine story “false” is because the White House and the Pentagon have denied claims made in Hersh’s article.
So no facts, just a denial from the Biden administration, seem legit.
As a result of the ‘fact-check,’ the article’s visibility has disappeared from the newsfeed.
This is yet another instance where big tech platforms censor accurate information that doesn’t fit the narrative.
Journalist and author Matt Palumbo writes in his new book “Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers: How the Left Hijacked and Weaponized the Fact-Checking Industry.”
Because the First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting speech, the Biden administration is attempting to backdoor censorship by having Big Tech implement it. As Glenn Greenwald points out, it is unconstitutional for the government to explicitly pressure private companies to censor, but it’s unclear where exactly that line is. Jen Psaki openly called for collusion with Big Tech to censor the administration’s opposition while serving as press secretary, at one point during a July 2021 briefing admitting that the White House was “flagging” Facebook posts containing so-called “COVID misinformation” for the platform to censor. Psaki admitted, “We are in regular touch with the social media platforms and those engagements typically happen through members of our senior staff and also members of our COVID-19 team” adding that the surgeon general had conveyed that this was a big issue.
Fact-checking organizations pose as neutral when in reality, they are just a front group for an NGO, government, or larger media corporation.
“The establishment is using partisan “fact checkers” to suppress journalism,” commented Ian Miles Cheong.
Facebook is also censoring Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh’s story on the destruction of Russia’s Nord Stream pipelines and the U.S. involvement.
READ: Trump ‘Laying Groundwork’ to Bring Peace to Ukraine, Russian State TV Says
