Facebook Blocks OutKick’s Trump-Tyrus Interview; Explanation Raises More Questions

Last week, Fox News contributor Tyrus sat down with Donald Trump for an exclusive interview for the latest episode of Maintaing With Tyrus on OutKick. The conversation focused on manhood, religion, schools, surviving an assassination attempt and also delved into who Trump is as a person.

A reader contacted OutKick to alert us that when they tried to share the YouTube link of the interview on Facebook, they were unable to do so and instead received a message stating the following: "Your content couldn't be shared because this goes against our Community Standards."

In response, we tried to share the video ourselves and were met with the same notification (see below). OutKick heard from dozens of people across America who had the same experience. 

OutKick inquired with Meta, Facebook's parent company, on Tuesday as to why users were unable to share our interview with a presidential candidate. We contacted several members of Meta's team. Only one responded. The official said the restriction on sharing the link was "an error" which they fixed after we reached out.

Great, but why did it happen in the first place? What was the "error?" We asked Meta for a specific explanation as to what the error was that prevented users from sharing the Trump interview. After much back and forth, Meta finally said "their system was having issues with some links generated by third-party URL shorteners."

Now, the use of such third-party shorteners can trigger a Community Standards violation. Problem is, at least in our testing, we didn't use a third-party URL shortener. We simply pasted in the URL from YouTube. 

Trouble With Another Trump Interview

The Trump-Tyrus interview wasn't the only video that people had trouble sharing. After the initial issue was pointed out, we tried to post Clay Travis' interview with Donald Trump from the Alabama-Georgia game earlier this month. The link to that interview was also blocked from sharing on Facebook and supposedly violated the same "Community Standards" as the Tyrus interview.

Hmm.

Another "error," probably. After we informed Meta that interview was blocked as well, it suddenly was unblocked within a couple of hours.

Interestingly, no such "errors" seem to occur for YouTube links that direct users to interviews with Kamala Harris. As a test, we tried posting Harris' recent sit down with "Call Her Daddy" and Charlamagne tha God on Facebook.

No problems:

So, is it just interviews with Trump that are blocked?

Not necessarily.

Trump recently appeared on Patrick Bed David's podcast and Theo Von's shows, and links to both episodes on YouTube are available to share on Facebook.

The "errors" appear to be specifically targeted toward OutKick's coverage of Donald Trump. And this isn't the first time this has happened.

Not The First Time

In 2020, OutKick founder Clay Travis testified in front of Congress that Facebook "cut the reach of our articles by 70 percent" following an interview he conducted with Trump on Aug. 11, 2020. The interview aired on Clay's former Fox Sports Radio, "OutKick the Coverage," and was summarized at OutKick.com.

"The day after that interview, Facebook tanked our traffic," Clay testified, adding that the decision, "cost my company hundreds of thousands of dollars."

Further, the videos OutKick has published interviewing Trump are hardly controversial. The two recent interviews could not have possibly violated any of Meta's Community Standards – which, per Meta, include "misinformation," spam, graphic violence, adult nudity and sexual activity, and promotion of Goods or Services.

The most polarizing statement on either episode was Trump calling the new NFL kickoff rule a "terrible mistake." (It was.)

That said, Meta has said the issue was related to third-party URL shorteners that we never used when trying to post the videos. 

What Is Going On With Facebook?

Due to opaque nature of how Facebook operates when it comes to its Community Standards, we are left to speculate about Meta's reason for suppressing our interviews. Perhaps some anonymous stooge in Silicon Valley barred the sharing of videos that include the terms "OutKick" and "Trump" in the same title. Maybe some Meta engineer loathes our beliefs that free speech is the bedrock of America, all racism is wrong, and men should not play sports with women. 

Who knows?

In September, 60 days before the election, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg issued a letter to the House Judiciary Committee admitting that the Biden-Harris administration pressured Meta (the parent company of Facebook and Instagram) in 2021 to censor COVID-related content that it deemed "disfavorable" to the White House.

Notably, in August 2022, Biden's former press secretary, Jen Psaki, told reporters that the White House had sent Facebook a list of "problematic" posts. A month later, Facebook announced it had removed more than 20 million pieces of COVID "misinformation," including posts doubting that mRNA vaccines and mask mandates would successfully stop the spread—which neither did as advertised.

"I believe the government pressure was wrong and I regret that we were not more outspoken," Zuckerberg wrote. "Like I said to our teams at the time, I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction — and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again."

"Still, despite the analyses I’ve seen showing otherwise, I know that some people believe this work benefited one party over the other. My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another — or to even appear to be playing a role." 

Well, it sure looks like Facebook is playing a role by blocking users from sharing interviews from OutKick featuring Donald Trump.

And that is unacceptable.

OutKick criticized Facebook for removing the posts about COVID-19, Twitter for banning Alex Berenson, YouTube for banning Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Elon Musk for suspending Kanye West from X.

So, we will defend ourselves here.

Politically motivated censorship of election content is dangerous. It's totalitarian. Literally. As any history buff would attest, censorship is the most vital tool of totalitarianism.

A voter's ability to properly educate themselves ahead of an election is severely weakened when the people in charge of the country's most influential tech companies purposely limit the visibility of factual information, to the detriment of only one political party.

Facebook did that in 2020 by suppressing the credibly reported Hunter Biden laptop story, which included examples of influence peddling under Biden. One in six Biden voters say they would have changed their vote had they known the truth about the report.

Just another "error."

We asked Meta multiple times privately to explain the "error" which blocked our interviews from being shared. The answer the company eventually provided raises even more questions. We now publicly ask Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to intervene. If he meant what he said back in September, he will investigate what happened and why. And then tell OutKick and America what he learned. We await his response.

Related story: Free Speech Is On The Ballot In 2024 | Bobby Burack