Facebook Is Politicizing the Coronavirus
by Shari Dovale
Check the headlines on any site you want. Nearly all stories will be about the Coronavirus, also known as Covid-19. Every news site is trying to come up with a new spin or take on this world-wide pandemic. They want (no, they NEED) to get people looking at their information instead of the “other guy”. How are they going to accomplish this feat?
It is not just the small independent and alternative news sites that have this problem. The larger Main Stream Media (MSM) have the same issue. They need people to consider them the first choice in news. The problem, however, is that the MSM has been exposed for their biased and fake news against President Trump and all conservatives.
They are blatantly left-leaning Socialists.
They are not the only sites that have a bias. Every single news outlet will have a bias. We here at Redoubt News have not hidden the fact that we are Christian Conservatives, therefore we do not promote the Socialist agenda. That is a bias.
The MSM promote the leftist agenda and Socialism. That is also a bias.
Facebook is a left-leaning propaganda machine. They promote the leftist agenda and Socialism. They shut down, or ban, anyone that does not adhere to their progressive agenda. This is a huge bias.
One of the major problems with Facebook is that they cannot tell the truth about their intolerance and “Own It”. They continue pretending that no one is onto their political bigotry and that people should just trust them. These types of delusions could be considered nearing neurotic levels.
Facebook has pretended that they are on the side of the regular people and are fighting what is commonly referred to as “Fake News”. However, Facebook has redefined what Fake News actually is for their own purposes.
Fake News, by definition, is news that is NOT TRUE. It is completely false. Despite the actual definition, the term is not used correctly, and Facebook is promoting the false meaning. In short, people use the phrase “fake news” about information they don’t like or don’t agree with, regardless if it is true or not. Facebook is no different in how it uses this term. They have an agenda, and anything that goes against this agenda will be defined as “Fake News”.
Case study
LifeNews.com wrote a recent article:
One of the sites for Facebook “debunking” is called Lead Stories. They claim to be “an innovative fact checking and debunking website” but actually seems to be mostly financed by Facebook:
Based on their article, the Life News article is considered a violation of Facebook TOS by claiming it is only “Half True” (Notice they did not call it FALSE.)
The Lead Stories author, using the same source The Atlantic, claims that Life News is inaccurate because it focuses only on the Coronavirus patients, not all patients:
The Italian College of Anesthesia, Analgesia, Resuscitation and Intensive Care published guidelines to help health care providers mete out staffing and medical resources, which applies to all those in intensive-care units, not just those with coronavirus.
However, the Life News article quoted the Atlantic, stating:
These guidelines apply even to patients who require intensive care for reasons other than the coronavirus, because they too make demands on the same scarce medical resources. As the document clarifies, “These criteria apply to all patients in intensive care, not just those infected with CoVid-19.”
That should have covered the question. However, the young journalism student that wrote the inaccurate article used her knowledge of word-spinning to do just what she accuses the conservative LifeNews site of doing.
She has written a biased article, using the same source, and coming to the same conclusions, yet spinning the information to allow for shutting down anyone that shares the right-leaning article instead of their own.
The author also claims that the decision has not been made; it is simply a proposal right now.
Triage is the process of determining the priority of patients’ treatments based on the severity of their condition. The AMA Journal of Ethics discusses Disaster and Mass Casualty Triage, in which they outline the different color codes for sorting patients.
A color-coded tagging method to categorize disaster victims in the field has been almost universally adopted and incorporated into existing triage systems.
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- Red Triage Tag (“Immediate” or T1 or Priority 1): Patients whose lives are in immediate danger and who require immediate treatment;
- Yellow Triage Tag (“Delayed” or T2 or Priority 2): Patients whose lives are not in immediate danger and who will require urgent, not immediate, medical care;
- Green Triage Tag (“Minimal” or T3 or Priority 3): Patients with minor injuries who will eventually require treatment;
- Black Triage Tag (“Expectant” or No Priority): Patients who are either dead or who have such extensive injuries that they can not be saved with the limited resources available.
They go on to tell us the “expectant” category can be the most challenging for caregivers from an ethical and emotional standpoint. While it is logical to help the greatest number of victims in a disaster, it is difficult to walk away from a person who is on the verge of succumbing to severe injuries. As the World Medical Association reminds us, “It is unethical for a physician to persist, at all costs, at maintaining the life of a patient beyond hope, thereby wasting to no avail scarce resources needed elsewhere”
As you can see, everyone has a triage program that would allow the medical personnel to not treat anyone they have determined to be beyond saving.
This lays out a clear argument that these procedures have already been implemented. They are not “simply a proposal.”
Consider these articles that have not been deemed “Fake News”:
Starting with The Atlantic, the original sourced material:
The Extraordinary Decisions Facing Italian Doctors
There are now simply too many patients for each one of them to receive adequate care.
Those who are too old to have a high likelihood of recovery, or who have too low a number of “life-years” left even if they should survive, would be left to die.
The Daily Beast:
On the Front Line Against Coronavirus in Locked Down Italy: Who Lives? Who Dies?
As COVID-19 wreaks havoc on the Italian health system, doctors are forced to decide who gets intensive care based on life expectancy.
In the northern Italian region of Lombardy, the epicenter of the novel coronavirus outbreak that erupted on Feb. 21, doctors say they are now practicing “disaster medicine.”
The term comes from wars and natural disasters, when emergency doctors use triage, prioritizing the order of treatment to decide who they will use scarce resources to try to save, and who they will let go.
If Covid-19 gets bad, triage will be needed. Are we ready for that?
The ethical justification generally given for withholding or removing potentially lifesaving care from one person or group without their consent and giving it to another is that the latter person or group has a significantly better chance at long-term survival.
Italy prioritises younger patients for treatment, in a war-like triage to tackle coronavirus
A substantial number of the patients diagnosed with coronavirus require ventilatory support due to complications that lead to pneumonia.
However, due to limited number of such facilities, doctors have now been recommended to put an age limit on a patient’s access to intensive care.
As a result, doctors are now making the difficult moral choice of prioritising those patients who are more likely to survive.
As you can see, Facebook is allowing for what they call inaccurate information to be shared by left-leaning sites, yet is shutting down, and allowing the shadow-banning of conservative sites that share what they seem to feel is the wrong article.
Redoubt News is not the only site that received this notice:
Now, consider the broader implications of this notice. Facebook has admitted that another website wrote the article. They state that we only shared the article. Yet, they have now placed us under admitted shadow-banning, or reduced the number of people that they are allowing to see our page, with no chance of seeing that corrected.
All because we shared an article they did not like.
Not that it was false, not that it was wrong, but that they did not like.
The fact checkers are wrong, yet Facebook is allowing it for political purposes.
Behind The Scenes
The author of the article is Molly Weisner. She is a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill studying media and journalism.
(I do wonder how a young journalism student would feel to be given the enormous power to be in control of shutting down a complete political base? It must be intoxicating.)
UNC also happens to be running The Center for Innovation for Sustainability in Local Media (CISLM), through UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media, who states they are Reinventing Local News.
They are financed in part by The Knight Foundation.
Within their granting program, in 2011 the Knight Foundation added the Black Male Engagement Challenge created to honor black men who step up to lead the community.
The Knight Foundation also financed the Knowledge Engine, a search engine project initiated in 2015 by the WikiMedia Foundation. The project was perceived as a scandal, mainly because it was conceived in secrecy. Most of the information available to the community was received through leaked documents published by The (Wikipedia) Signpost in 2016.
CISLM has apparently been conducting research on “news deserts” of which Wikipedia defines as a community that is no longer covered by daily newspapers. The term emerged in the United States after hundreds of daily and weekly newspapers were closed in the 2000s and the 2010s.
In an article published by CISLM, What exactly is a “News Desert”? their first paragraph turns the entire issue political by creating a correlation between Trump’s 2016 election success and counties considered to be a “news desert”.
Their new definition concludes that a news desert is a community “with limited access to the sort of credible and comprehensive news and information that feeds democracy at the grassroots level.“
They are leaving the reader with the impression that they believe that Trump supporters have little to no access to “real” news, therefore must not be able to perceive or understand what is truly important. How does that sound coming from a School of Journalism?
If you follow the links to other articles, you will see that they have written on the media’s influence on elections:
Newspapers have three main levers for informing their electorate and shaping the debate: (1) regular coverage of candidates, (2) question-and-answer (Q&A) features that provide a forum for candidates to offer their positions on issues, and (3) editorial endorsements to help voters in their candidate selection, especially in elections where voters have little information on specific policies, offices, or candidates (e.g. judges).
This would indicate that they believe in, and promote, the notion that bias is acceptable. At least, bias is acceptable for them. Yet, they are using this very excuse to shut down their competition.
The views, opinions, or positions expressed by the authors and those providing comments are theirs alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, positions of Redoubt News. Social Media, including Facebook, has greatly diminished distribution of our content to our readers’ newsfeeds and is instead promoting Main Stream Media sources. This is called ‘Shadow-banning’. Please take a moment and consider sharing this article with your friends and family. Thank you. Please support our coverage of your rights. Donate here: paypal.me/RedoubtNews
