Louisiana AG Rips Facebook's Censorship of Breitbart in Scathing Letter to Zuckerberg
Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry is criticizing Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg after Facebook took down a video of doctors supporting the use of the drug hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19.
America’s Frontline Doctors held a news conference on July 27 to discuss its members’ opinions about treating COVID-19.
The group said on its website, which is no longer available to the public, that “American life has fallen casualty to a massive disinformation campaign,” according to an archived version of the webpage.
“We can speculate on how this has happened, and why it has continued, but the purpose of the inaugural White Coat Summit is to empower Americans to stop living in fear. If Americans continue to let so-called experts and media personalities make their decisions, the great American experiment of a Constitutional Republic with Representative Democracy, will cease.”
The group’s video was posted on Breitbart’s Facebook page until it was taken down.
In a Monday letter to Zuckerberg, posted on Breitbart, Landry said Facebook’s effort to muzzle the group was part of the social media giant’s campaign to censor voices with which it disagrees, noting that “your platform again seems to be showing political bias.”
He then went on to contrast Zuckerberg’s public pronouncements that Facebook will let its users decide what information they want to receive with its recent heavy-handed tactics.
“It seems you and your team at Facebook choose to censor or misuse your algorithms to downplay voices on one side of the issues while failing to do so on the other,” the Republican attorney general wrote.
“Recently, Breitbart News and others live-streamed a group of licensed American doctors who were sharing their professional medical opinions regarding COVID-19.
“Apparently, Facebook made a choice to limit their voices.”
Landry did not say he necessarily agreed with the doctors, but said that their conclusions should not be censored by a platform that supposedly exists to allow all voices to speak.
“In our free country, the American people deserve to hear all voices and stories so they can evaluate information and make decisions for themselves,” Landry wrote, urging Zuckerberg to stop allowing “blatant political bias to scare doctors and their patients away from a potential lifesaving treatment.”
“You can give access to all the information available on this pandemic. You can allow users to make decisions for themselves,” he added.
Facebook said at the time it was acting to adhere to its policy of not allowing false claims to be published.
Last week, Republican Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin asked Zuckerberg about an incident on Twitter in which Donald Trump Jr.’s account was restricted after he posted a positive message about hydroxychloroquine, according to Mediaite.
After noting that the incident did not concern Facebook, Zuckerberg said, “We do prohibit content that will lead to an imminent risk of harm, and stating that there is a proven cure for COVID, when there is in fact none, might encourage somebody to take something that could have some adverse effect.”
According to a transcript of the America’s Frontline Doctors press conference posted on Rev.com, Dr. Stella Immanuel of Houston said she has treated 350 COVID-19 patients with hydroxychloroquine, among other drugs, and has “not lost one. Not a diabetic, not a somebody with high blood pressure, not somebody who [has] asthma, not an old person. We’ve not lost one patient.”
Immanuel said that the truth is being withheld.
“So if some fake science, some person sponsored by all these fake pharma companies comes out say, ‘We’ve done studies and they found out that it doesn’t work,’ I can tell you categorically it’s fixed science. I want to know who is sponsoring that study. I want to know who is behind it because there is no way I can treat 350 patients and counting and nobody is dead and they all did better,” she said.
“This virus has a cure. It is called hydroxychloroquine, zinc and Zithromax.
“I know you people want to talk about a mask. Hello? You don’t need mask. There is a cure.”
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