Does Facebook take down posts that include the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag? No, that's not true: A Facebook spokesperson said there was no truth to this. And posts with the Pledge of Allegiance are on Facebook at the time of this writing.
The claim appeared in a July 4, 2020, Facebook post. It opens:
FB took it down!!!!!!! Repost!!!!😨
The Pledge of Allegiance is underneath that. Under that image is:
I want to challenge everyone to repost our country's flag. With the Pledge of Allegiance as it was written.
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Thu Jul 29 14:05:06 2021 UTC)
Lead Stories emailed Facebook's press team on July 28, 2021. A Facebook spokesperson responded the same day:
On background, there's no truth to that. That particular meme doesn't violate our Community Standards, so we've never taken it down ... Simply posting the pledge of allegiance does not violate our Community Standards.
Linked here is an example of a Facebook post that includes the Pledge of Allegiance and is still up for everyone to see. This is a link to Facebook's Community Standards.
(Editors' Note: Facebook is a client of Lead Stories, which is a third-party fact checker for the social media platform. On our About page, you will find the following information:
Since February 2019 we are actively part of Facebook's partnership with third-party fact checkers. Under the terms of this partnership we get access to listings of content that has been flagged as potentially false by Facebook's systems or its users and we can decide independently if we want to fact check it or not. In addition to this we can enter our fact checks into a tool provided by Facebook and Facebook then uses our data to help slow down the spread of false information on its platform. Facebook pays us to perform this service for them but they have no say or influence over what we fact check or what our conclusions are, nor do they want to.
