CNN Reporter Slammed for ‘Lobbying’ Facebook to Shut Down ‘InfoWars’

CNN Center in Atlanta on Aug. 10, 2014. f11photo/Shutterstock

A CNN reporter was pilloried on social media after he “lobbied” Facebook for not removing Alex Jones’s “InfoWars.”

“Facebook is hosting an event about how committed they are to fighting fake news, but they have no good answer when I ask as to why they permit InfoWars to have a page on their platform,” CNN’s Oliver Darcy tweeted on Wednesday evening.

His comment caught the attention of Donald Trump Jr., President Trump’s son, who thought Darcy’s tone was hypocritical.

“Seriously, if someone is going to lead the charge against fake news, shouldn’t they be a lot more credible than CNN?” Trump Jr. asked.

Darcy appeared to misunderstand Trump Jr.’s comment, responding in a tweet Thursday that “color me shocked that you are coming to the defense of InfoWars” despite Trump Jr. not lending a word of support to “InfoWars.”

President Trump has repeatedly slammed CNN as a “fake news” outlet. At the G-7 summit last month, Trump asked someone what news outlet the reporter was with. “I figured. Fake news CNN. The worst,” Trump responded when he heard it was CNN.

Elsewhere on Twitter, Darcy was slammed for his comments as tantamount to censorship. “It’s an obvious slope to censorship. Where else does this happen?” wrote one user. Many users described both CNN and Darcy purveyors of “fake news.”

In his CNN article, it appears Darcy asked three different Facebook officials why the “InfoWars” Facebook page, which has nearly 1 million followers, hasn’t yet been removed.

Facebook’s News Feed chief John Hegeman responded to Darcy’s “InfoWars” inquiry, saying the site has “not violated something that would result in them being taken down.”

“We work hard to find the right balance between encouraging free expression and promoting a safe and authentic community, and we believe that down-ranking inauthentic content strikes that balance,” added Facebook spokeswoman Lauren Svensson in the article. “In other words, we allow people to post it as a form of expression, but we’re not going to show it at the top of News Feed.”

Paul Joseph Watson, a popular YouTube pundit with more than 800,000 followers on Twitter, wrote that CNN tried “to lobby YouTube to shut down our channel” but failed.

“Why is CNN - a news outlet - behaving like the news mafia?” he asked.