Facebook accused of suppressing journo’s story on alleged US involvement in Nord Stream pipeline explosion
Facebook has been accused of suppressing a story by an investigative journalist who accused the United States of blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines.
Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh wrote a detailed account claiming that the interfering US blew up the Nord Stream pipelines, but Facebook has been accused of suppressing the story. The Thaiger faced a similar situation last month when Facebook suppressed a story about former drug lord Pablo Escobar’s hippos. They have yet to reply to the reasons why. Read the story HERE:
Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times, published his story on substack.com on Wednesday, February 8.
Facebook added qualifiers to the story and redirected readers to an article on a Norwegian website. The pipelines carried natural gas from Russia to Western Europe and have a terminus in Germany. The US and other NATO countries have placed economic sanctions on Russia since the start of its military conflict with Ukraine in February 2022.
Facebook has been accused of interfering in news distribution by blocking the article. Caitlin Johnstone, an Australian journalist, said…
“Facebook does not explain how a ‘fact-checking’ company which operates in conjunction with Norwegian state media can be regarded as ‘independent’ regarding an article which explicitly accuses the Norwegian government of extremely egregious crimes.”
Facebook users trying to share the URL from Hersh’s story receive the message…
“Before you share this content, you might want to know that there’s additional reporting from Faktisk. Pages and websites that repeatedly publish or share false news will see their overall distribution reduced and be restricted in other ways.”
Faktisk.no is a Norwegian “fact-checking” website produced in cooperation with Norwegian mass media and NRK, Norway’s state broadcasting company.
Twitter user “Nuno Marques” posted on Thursday, April 20 that Hersh’s report “is now banned on Facebook and Reddit in Norway,” and that the Norwegian government is “demanding censorship of this news as they learned more than half of their citizens were against the Nord Stream bombings!”
Author Michael Shellenberger, writing on substack.com, said…
“Instead of allowing people to make up their own minds, Facebook has decided to take a side.”
The New York Times published a story on March 7 suggesting that a pro-Ukrainian group was behind the explosions. The article does not carry similar warnings by Facebook, nor do accounts that allege Russia was behind the pipelines’ destruction. Russian website RT.com tweeted on April 21…
“The notoriously ‘impartial’ Facebook red flags Seymour Hersh’s reporting on Nord Stream sabotage as ‘false’ citing counterclaims by ‘independent fact-checkers from Norway and Ukraine.”
George Beebe, a former CIA officer and now head of the Quincy Institute’s Grand Strategy program, said…
“The Biden administration seems to be recognizing that the story of the Russians blowing up their own pipeline wasn’t holding any water.
“This doesn’t mean (that The New York Times story) is wrong, but it sure does raise questions in my mind as to what is going on here.”
Interference in the foreign affairs of other nations by the US? Surely not.
