Popular Viral Video Firm Sues Facebook over Russian Propaganda Label
The company behind In The Now, Soapbox and Waste-Ed is taking on media giant
Facebook, who it claims is falsely labeling it as Russian state-controlled
propaganda.
by Alan Macleod
August 15th, 2020
By Alan Macleod
An online media company is suing social media giant Facebook for falsely
smearing it as a Russian state-controlled propaganda outlet. Maffick, the
owner of In The Now, Soapbox and Waste-Ed, has filed a lawsuit against
Facebook in a Northern California district court for defamation, intentional
interference and violating section 43(a) of the Lanham Act, unjustly causing
them economic and reputational harm, claiming that Facebook's actions
represent unfair competitive practices.
Go to any of the Maffick-owned Facebook pages, including In The Now (4.9
million followers), which focuses on light-hearted news and social justice
issues, Soapbox (320,000 followers), featuring politically opinionated
videos, or Waste-Ed (216,000 followers), with content on environmental
topics, and you are greeted with a warning from Facebook: "This publisher is
wholly or partially under the editorial control of a state." Maffick
strenuously denies this, noting that its sole owner, Anissa Naouai, is a
U.S. citizen living in California. "In doing all of these actions, Facebook
has acted fraudulently, with actual malice and in reckless disregard for the
truth," the complaint alleges.
MintPress reached out to Naouai for comment, but, for legal reasons, she was
hesitant to speak about the case specifically. Rania Khalek, who makes
videos for Soapbox, however, was far more forthcoming. "Facebook has a list
of criteria they came up with for what constitutes state-controlled media.
We don't meet any of the criteria on that list. But they still labeled us
that way. And this comes after a couple of years of being relentlessly
attacked by U.S.-government backed think tanks like the Atlantic Council.who
have been trying to get us censored," she told The Katie Halper Show.
Why is Facebook targeting Maffick? In the past, it was indeed majority-owned
by Ruptly, a subsidiary company of RT, which receives funding from the
Russian government. Naouai also previously hosted a show on the network
called In The Now, further complicating things. However, the lawsuit claims
the company has been completely owned and controlled by Naouai for over a
year. Nevertheless, for many living through a climate of heightened concern
about foreign-sponsored fake news, this is doubtless enough to raise
suspicions, if not to condemn the project completely.
For their part, Facebook is not buying the new changes in ownership, a
company spokesperson telling MintPress today that, "We want people to know
if the news they read on Facebook is coming from a publication we believe is
under the control of a government and we've made public the criteria we use
to make this determination. This lawsuit is without merit and we will defend
ourselves vigorously." MintPress also contacted the attorneys for Maffick,
but as of the publication of this article, they have not responded.
The effect on Maffick's business has been considerable, with the company
taking hits on revenue, engagement and viewing figures. Future partnerships
with other brands are also in doubt. Who would want to do business with a
Russian propaganda outlet? "This is a slippery slope," said Khalek, "Because
if Facebook can just label our page 'Russian state-controlled media' when it
is not true - it is a factually false claim to make, what can stop them from
labelling any page anything they want to label it?"
"I have put my whole life into building Maffick," Naouai told MintPress. "I
won't let Facebook destroy my business because of politics. We play by the
rules and deserve a fair chance to monetize our content which has been
devastated by this false disclaimer."
Et tu, Twitter?
Twitter has also affixed a warning to Maffick's pages, describing them as
"Russia state-affiliated media." Last week it announced new labels for
government and state-backed media accounts. "In 2019, we banned all
state-backed media advertising and political advertising from Twitter. Today
we're expanding the types of political accounts we label," they wrote.
Many users immediately noted, however, that the new warning notices were
only being applied to Russian media like RT, and not other government-funded
ventures like the BBC, France 24, or Voice of America. Furthermore,
journalist Ben Norton exposed how Twitter is still taking money from the
U.S. government to constantly promote Voice of America Farsi content into
Iran in an effort to foment anti-government sentiment.
Twitter had a response to some of the criticism: "We believe that people
have the right to know when a media account is affiliated directly or
indirectly with a state actor. State-financed media organizations with
editorial independence, like the BBC in the U.K. or NPR in the U.S. for
example, will not be labeled," it wrote.
Jesse Owen Hearns-Branaman, Assistant Professor of International Journalism
at the United International College in Zhuhai, China, was not particularly
impressed with the response. "In an effort to show they're trying to do
something, anything to combat 'fake news' or 'disinformation', Facebook,
Twitter and YouTube are going after the lowest hanging fruit: media owned or
affiliated with governments. It's much easier to add a label saying 'state
funded' and wash your hands of the whole situation than to deal with the
fact they are the central battlefield in a modern information war," he told
MintPress.
Others were more cynical. "Twitter is insulting the intelligence of its
users. Or perhaps its executives really believe what they wrote about the
BBC - which would itself illustrate the ideological uniformity of western
media," said Joe Emersberger, a media analyst who writes for Fairness and
Accuracy in Reporting. Emersberger noted that academic studies had found the
organization to display the strongest pro-war bias, while for decades it
actively collaborated with British intelligence services, vetting all
important appointments to ensure leftists were not hired.
State-backed media warns of state-backed media
What the discussion misses, however, is that massive platforms like Facebook
and Twitter are themselves state-affiliated media. Facebook, for example,
partners with the Atlantic Council, a Cold War-era NATO think tank, to help
them cultivate the news feeds of its 2.7 billion worldwide users. The
Atlantic Council's board of directors is a who's who of the most powerful
American state officials, including notorious war planner Henry Kissinger,
influential Bush-era operatives like Condoleezza Rice, James Baker and Colin
Powell, virtually every living CIA chief, including Leon Panetta, Michael
Chertoff, Michael Hayden and Michael Morell, and ex-military commanders like
Admiral James Stavridis and General Wesley Clark. When an organization like
this is deciding what the world sees, what else to call it but state
censorship on a global level? Worse still, the Atlantic Council is at the
forefront of pushing questionable RussiaGate narratives, publishing a string
of highly dubious reports claiming that virtually every political party in
Europe that is challenging the status quo from the left or right is secretly
controlled or manipulated by the Kremlin. These are, in turn, used as
justification for more political changes.
Meanwhile, Twitter works with Freedom House, a conservative organization
that is overwhelmingly funded by Washington. In 2006, the Financial Times
reported that the U.S. government hired Freedom House to perform
"clandestine activities," (i.e. regime change operations) in Iran. Even more
blatantly, last year a senior Twitter executive with editorial
responsibility for the entire Middle East region was exposed as an active
officer in the British Army's 77th Brigade, a unit dedicated to online
psychological operations and propaganda. The news failed to garner any
mainstream attention whatsoever, save for a single article in Newsweek. The
journalist responsible for the story resigned a few weeks later, citing
strong editorial pressure to toe a certain line.
"What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century," wrote Google executives
Eric Schmidt and Larry Cohen in their book, "The New Digital Age,
"technology and cyber-security companies [like Google] will be to the
twenty-first," suggesting that big tech see themselves as leaders in a
global information war. The book was heartily endorsed by Atlantic Council
director Henry Kissinger.
Implicit in much of the discussion about media bias is that it is only
state-owned media that has an agenda, with the corporate press being
"independent," "neutral," or "objective." This is not the case. While
state-backed media's agenda's tend to be relatively straightforward, the
complex array of financial interests corporate media has is often much
harder to discern. All media, even alternative media, has an agenda, with
writers wishing to propagate and spread their worldview. That is why until
the 1940s all political content was called "propaganda," until the word fell
out of fashion, and began to be applied only to political enemies.
Nevertheless, state-owned media is constantly assessed by the public as more
trustworthy. A greater proportion of the public in the United Kingdom,
Sweden, the Netherlands, Japan, Finland, Switzerland, Austria, Ireland,
Japan and Portugal trust their public broadcaster more than any private news
outlet. Indeed, BBC America is the most trusted major news source in the
United States as well, according to the latest edition of the Reuters
Institute Digital News Report.
"They don't want people to see anti-war content"
The net effect of all the concern over Russian-backed fake news has been to
extend mainstream media's control of the Internet, to the detriment of
foreign and alternative media. As big companies like Google, Twitter,
Facebook, and Bing changed their algorithms to elevate "reputable" sources,
high-quality alternative news sites suffered huge drops in traffic,
throttling their influence and threatening their very existence. After
Google changed its algorithm, for instance, Common Dreams traffic fell by 37
percent, Democracy Now! by 36 percent, and Truth-Out by 25 percent. Under
the guise of fighting misinformation, anti-war sites have been hit the
hardest. MintPress was essentially blacklisted for its coverage of Syria and
Palestine, which did not fit the narrative Washington would like to project
onto the world. Likewise, hundreds of thousands of Russian, Chinese,
Venezuelan, and Iranian accounts have been removed from Facebook and Twitter
on the grounds that they were spreading misinformation. But American
accounts do not suffer the same fate.
Indeed, the U.S. government has sometimes directly involved itself with
online censorship. Facebook announced earlier this year it would delete all
positive mentions of the recently assassinated Iranian General Qassem
Soleimani across its many platforms. Soleimani's organization, the Iranian
Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), was labeled a terrorist group by the Trump
administration. According to polls, he was Iran's most popular living
figure. "We operate under U.S. sanctions laws, including those related to
the U.S. government's designation of the IRGC and its leadership," said a
Facebook spokesperson, explaining the decision. Thus, President Trump
himself was able to stop Iranians in Iran speaking in Farsi sharing a
majority opinion online to other Iranians, because of the power the
government holds over Silicon Valley.
For Khalek, the political message she is sharing explains Facebook's latest
actions against Maffick. "The main reason why we have been continuously
attacked by these think tanks is because of the stuff that is produced at
Soapbox.Soapbox is very progressive and has a very obvious, anti-war bent,"
she said. "If they can do it to us, they can do it to anyone," she warned.
"they don't want people to see anti-war content."
Feature photo | MintPress | Antonio