The NRA is accusing Meta of “election interference” after the tech giant cracked down on social media posts it deemed “false information” about Vice President Kamala Harris.
The gun rights advocacy group had criticized Harris for her liberal gun control stance, something she has attempted to distance herself from as the Democratic presidential nominee.
On Sept. 18, the NRA shared a 2007 clip of Harris, then a San Francisco D.A., talking tough on the city’s efforts against handguns.
“Just because you legally possess a gun in the sanctity of your locked home doesn’t mean that we’re got going to walk into that home and check to see if you’re being responsible,” Harris said at the time.
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The NRA added captions to the clip reading “Kamala Harris will seize your legally owned guns,” adding “Kamala Harris wants mass gun confiscation, and she’s willing to weaponize the government to enter your home and seize your legally owned gun.”
However, on Sept. 24, the post was slapped with a “false information” label on both Instagram and Facebook.
“Independent fact-checkers say this information has no basis in fact. You can choose whether to see it,” a disclaimer tells Facebook users.
“Third-party fact-checkers say the information in this post is false,” Instagram similarly told its users.
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Both disclaimers link to an article published by FactCheck.org, which is “one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media,” according to an editor’s note.
“During the 2020 presidential race, then-Sen. Kamala Harris came out in support of a mandatory buyback program for so-called assault weapons,” FactCheck.org began. “As the current Democratic nominee for president, Harris continues to support a ban on purchasing certain semiautomatic weapons. But her campaign told us she is no longer advocating that Americans be required to give up weapons that they had legally purchased.”
The article went on to cite Harris from the presidential debate when she said “We’re not taking anybody’s guns away” and accused the NRA of “misrepresenting” her current position on firearms.
Another NRA post on Instagram saying “All Kamala Harris knows about guns is that she wants to ban them” was similarly hit with a “missing context” disclaimer. The video attached to the post was of Harris’ combative exchange about universal background checks from her sit-down with reporters from the National Association of Black Journalists.
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“In the precious few weeks left before the election, the NRA’s ability to reach key audiences is crucial,” Randy Kozuch, executive director of the NRA’s lobbying arm NRA-ILA (Institute for Legislative Action) told Fox News Digital. “Efforts by left-wing organizations like FactCheck.org that exploit Meta’s rules to throttle key messaging from groups like the NRA become their own information operation and come uncomfortably close to election interference” he noted.
“Given Meta’s self-admitted record of censoring certain viewpoints, we would hope they wouldn’t allow their platform to be manipulated once again. The American people deserve to understand what is truly at risk with regard to their right to keep and bear arms in this election,” Kozuch added to Fox News Digital.
Meta did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
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