Congressional Candidate Claims Comcast Blocked Campaign Messages

There is a real concern among Americans in 2020 that the digital barons of the nation may be doing more to shape the upcoming election than they are letting on.

After all, these massively influential corporations have grown to the point in which our legal system and oversight organizations have been unable to keep up.  It would be far too easy for these media megaliths to meddle in or molest our elections, as no one in any regulatory role has yet had the opportunity to catch up – at least in terms of pure technological knowledge.

In many ways, this has led to an overall “wild west” vibe online, where the Googles and Facebooks of the world will operate under the idea that they would rather ask for forgiveness later than permission now.

Laura Loomer, a far right candidate for Congress in 2020, is now claiming that this is precisely what Comcast has done.

Congressional candidate Laura Loomer, the far right internet provocateur banned from most social media, ride sharing and money transfer platforms for hate speech, has relied on text messaging and emails to raise money.

So, when a fundraising text message she planned to share with donors Monday about endorsements from Roger Stone and GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz was rejected by Comcast Xfinity for “dangerous content,” Loomer was stunned.

“There is no reason I should be shut down,” said Loomer. “This is the primary way we get messages out, via text messages and email … they are now shutting down every way of communicating.”

The massive media company pushed back against that claim.

Comcast released a statement Tuesday acknowledging the problem but said it had nothing to do with the content of Loomer’s text messages. Instead, the problem had to do with the third-party text messaging platform that Loomer uses to distribute her messages and the third-party threat-intelligence services that Comcast uses to screen potential threats.

For some reason unknown to Loomer and not revealed by the company, Comcast’s third-party threat-intelligence service automatically flagged the third-party text-messaging platform used by Loomer.

“In this case, our security platform — which leverages widely used third-party threat-intelligence services — flagged the texting provider used by Laura Loomer’s campaign as a potential threat,” according to a spokesperson for Comcast. “Anyone using this texting provider would have had the same experience, not only with our service, but with any security service using similar threat-intelligence lists. The security alert had nothing to do with the content or sender of any communication.”

Loomer was unapologetic in her claims, stating bluntly that her campaign “believes [the interruption] was politically motivated”.