There has been a lot of talk about big tech censorship following the permanent Twitter ban of President Donald Trump and the loss of thousands of conservative voices during the subsequent “Twitter purge.” While many social media users are looking for new apps to migrate to that are more friendly to free speech, Candace Owens doesn’t appear to be going anywhere. Instead, she is fighting back against social media censorship.
In November, Owens announced that she was launching a lawsuit against Facebook’s fact-checkers. “It is time to fact-check the fact-checkers,” Owens declared.
Owens alleged that the fact-checkers are “activists for the left that shut down your speech if they don’t like it.” The conservative firebrand claimed her Facebook page was unfairly demonetized, and was she was suing the fact-checkers for defamation.
In less than two weeks after announcing the lawsuit, one of Facebook’s third-party fact-checkers was forced to issue a correction.
Politifact, one of Facebook’s biggest fact-checkers, had to retract a “false” rating it labeled one of Candace’s posts about Joe Biden.
“Well, I’m suing a site called ‘Lead Stories,” Owens said in the video. “Lead Stories is run by a former CNN employee of 26 years, who makes a living cannibalizing and slandering conservative content and creators.”
“His website has published disputed fake news stories, including one that went after my content personally, so I’m going after him…personally,” Candace said.
“Who funds Lead Stories? According to their own masthead, Lead Stories is funded by Facebook and Google, along with ByteDance,” Owens explained.
“And what is ByteDance? It’s a Beijing-based company that owns the TikTok spyware app. Our own Justice Department says the company is a ‘national security threat and compromised by the Communist Party of China.'”
“Facebook then is paying for fact-checkers funded by an arm of the Communist Party of China to censor my content, here, in America. The Communist Party of China had more say over my content than the First Amendment,” she added. “This is insanity. It’s un-American. It’s dangerous. And it needs to stop. This is why I am fighting.”
Owens launched the Fact-Check Zuck site for her legal battle against Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
In September, Justice Department lawyers said ByteDance CEO Zhang Yiming has made public statements showing he is “committed to promoting” the agenda of the Chinese Communist Party, as reported by NPR.
The White House recognized ByteDance as a potential security risk because of CCP ties in August:
TikTok, a video-sharing mobile application owned by the Chinese company ByteDance Ltd., has reportedly been downloaded over 175 million times in the United States and over one billion times globally. TikTok automatically captures vast swaths of information from its users, including Internet and other network activity information such as location data and browsing and search histories.
This data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information — potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.
Trump threatened to ban ByteDance’s TikTok app in September, but the parties involved reached a deal a month later.
