The Wes Cook Band said that Facebook prevented them from promoting their “I Stand For The Flag” song due to its “political content.”
“It has [to do] with a level of political bias that we feel that Facebook has within its algorithms,” band member Nathan Stoops told “Fox & Friends” Thursday. “If these algorithms are programmed to reject content like ‘I Stand for the Flag,’ then I think that would give a lot of Americans the right to be offended by that level of bias within a company that purports itself to be politically neutral.”
WATCH:
“It’s meant to be a healthy message for Americans, it’s not political. It’s patriotic,” he added.
The members of the country band went on to explain that on Monday they had released a video for the song ahead of the Fourth of July and wanted to promote it for 24 hours using the site’s paid for promotion tools. The group at first was notified that the ad was approved, but that decision was then revoked due to its “political content” the band shared.
Late Tuesday Facebook told Fox that they had made a mistake, but the ad had expired by the time the site notified them of the decision.
“We recently announced anyone running ads about political or other major national issues must include a ‘paid for’ label,” the Facebook spokesperson explained. “After looking again, we determined that this ad doesn’t need that label. While this is a new policy, and while we won’t ever be perfect, we think knowing who is behind an ad is important, and we’ll continue to work on improving as we roll it out.”
The same spokesperson said that if the same ad were to run again it would be approved. However, band members told Fox that they tried to re-run the ad again Wednesday and it was rejected. Facebook has responded that they are “looking into the situation.”
One of the lyrics of the song says, “Don’t care if you’re black or white or who you love, I stand for the Flag and the Flag stands for all of us.”