Its slowly becoming clear that US state governors were contacted by the social media giant Facebook over Reopen America events, not the other way around.
While CNN reporters initially tweeted that the governors were the ones to ask Facebook to ban the event pages of Reopen America, its now looking more likely that Facebook actively pursued guidance from state governors in a move to shut down groups that were organizing protests themselves.
State governors say they didnt ask Facebook to censor the groups.
But that appears to not have been true. (surprise, surprise, CNN)
Whats more, another CNN reporter also ended up sharing a tweet along the same lines of Facebook shutting down pages due to government orders.
While CNN, as well as other newshouses such as Politico, reported that Facebook shut down the protests based on the governments orders, the governors office of Nebraska has made it crystal clear that it had no involvement whatsoever and that it was Facebooks own decision to delete the groups from the platform.
The Governors Office is not aware of any Facebook events regarding COVID-19 protests, and has not requested Facebook to pull any events down. Facebook reached out last week to learn more about Nebraskas social distancing restrictions, and the Governors staff provided already publicly available information about Nebraskas ten-person limit and Directed Health Measures, said the Nebraska governors office, when Reclaim The Net asked them what was going on.
Furthermore, even New Jerseys governor denied their involvement in the decision to shut down pages and said, The governors office did not ask Facebook to remove pages or posts for events promoting lifting the provisions of the governors stay-at-home order.
Facebook CEO Zuckerberg has himself now changed course and said that the event groups were actually banned for spreading harmful misinformation.
We do classify that as harmful misinformation and we take that down, Zuckerberg said. At the same time, its important that people can debate policies, so theres a line on this, you know, more than normal political discourse. I think a lot of the stuff that people are saying that is false around a health emergency like this can be classified as harmful misinformation.
Nonetheless, when we pressed Facebook, they said that it may revisit its decision on the matter and reverse any page takedowns as governments havent actually prohibited any such events.