Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made censorship — particularly claims that the government, news media and technology platforms tried to suppress his message — a cornerstone of his independent presidential campaign.
This weekend, Mr. Kennedy was given even more fuel for his argument when Facebook and Instagram blocked a link to a new, slickly produced 30-minute ad supporting his candidacy. The link appeared to have been blocked from late Friday afternoon until around midday Saturday.
Meta, which owns both platforms, called the episode a mistake. Andy Stone, a spokesman for Meta, said the link was incorrectly flagged as spam. “It was mistakenly blocked and resolved within hours” of the problem being discovered, Mr. Stone said.
Tony Lyons, a founder of American Values 2024, the super PAC that paid for the ad, did not immediately comment.
The commercial, narrated by actor Woody Harrelson and taking the form of an infomercial, was produced by Jay Carson, an informal adviser to Mr. Kennedy who is also a Hollywood screenwriter and a former top adviser to Hillary Clinton.
The ad is intended to introduce Mr. Kennedy to a broad audience and portray him as a champion of a clean environment, good government and American values, free from corporate influences that he says have corrupted the major political parties and endangered the health of Americans.
The ad also attempts to confront criticism of Mr. Kennedy in a lighthearted way. It begins with him reading press clippings that describe him as, among other things, “clearly disturbed,” “so crazy,” “a walking, talking conspiracy theory,” and a “humorless tyrant.”
After the video was posted on Friday, Instagram and Facebook users began reporting that posts containing the link had been removed because they appeared to violate the platform’s terms of service, according to screenshots shared either with The New York Times or were posted online by supporters of the campaign.
On Saturday, the campaign posted a TikTok showing a compilation of error messages. The campaign also sent a fundraising email to its supporters, asking them to document what it described as “election interference.” In a post on Facebook this afternoon, Mr. Kennedy called the ad “the Bobby Kennedy video that Facebook doesn’t want you to see.”
In the ad, Mr. Kennedy traces his evolution as the scion of a storied American political dynasty and describes his struggles with heroin addiction after beginning his legal career more than four decades ago.
Sobriety brought him back to nature, he says, and pushed him toward a career as an environmental lawyer.
This work initially brought him awards, highly paid speeches, glossy magazines and photo shoots with celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey and Julia Roberts. But then, as the complaint says, he turned his attention to theories about the supposed dangers of childhood vaccinations and found that major news media outlets that had once celebrated him were now portraying him as a dangerous purveyor of conspiracy theories.
The ad is about Mr. Kennedy’s physical fitness – at one point Mr. Harrelson says, “He can do 25 pull-ups at once. I can do three.” Mr. Harrelson is never shown in the ad, but his voice is unmistakable. (“They need to rock the damn boat,” he says at another point, “because the system needs not just marginal improvements, but actually a comprehensive rethink.”)
Mr. Kennedy’s wife, actress Cheryl Hines, is interviewed in the ad, and Jack Dorsey, a founder of Twitter, appears briefly to praise him.
Mr. Kennedy’s skepticism about vaccinations – which includes debunked claims that some childhood vaccinations are linked to autism – and his accusations of government overreach found a wider audience during the coronavirus pandemic, although Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and other platforms that advertised his account and others disabled what the companies called medical misinformation.
In the ad he explains his stance on Covid-19: “I feared that a rushed Covid vaccine would not be as safe and effective as we were promised. And I also felt like lockdowns would do more harm than good, especially for small businesses and children. But when I made these arguments publicly, I was silenced.”
Mr. Kennedy’s social media accounts were restored last year after he became a presidential candidate.
Source link
2024-05-05 23:27:20
www.nytimes.com
