Social-Media
Biden's campaign blames Facebook for 'regression' on Trump's false statements
Joe Biden 's campaign condemned Facebook for allowing President Donald Trump to spread misleading information about voting, calling Facebook's moderation a "regression" from promises made earlier this month. Biden's letter, first published by Axios and received by The Verge, urges CEO Mark Zuckerberg to delete posts where Trump casts doubt on mail-in ballots and encourages people to vote twice.
We were told that Facebook was working on how best to adapt its new, more proactive approach to voting disinformation, says campaign manager Jen O'Malley Dillon. Instead of seeing improvement, we have seen a decline. Facebook's ongoing promise of potential intervention acts as nothing more than an excuse for inaction.
The Biden campaign previously published an open letter to Facebook in June urging the company to delete fake information and enforce its rules against the suppression of voters. Since then, Facebook has released an information center for voters and announced that it would stop accepting political advertising before the US presidential election. But his attempts to mark Trump's voting-related posts have often stopped offering general election facts, not actually the fact-checking of tweets.
Facebook has made a promise to delete material that involves "implicit distortions of voting," as well as "calls for organized intervention" in elections. The Biden campaign claims that several Trump posts breach these measures, as well as one from Donald Trump Jr., who called on Trump supporters to join the "army" to combat the addition of "millions of fake ballots" to the election results. (There is no evidence of attempts to table fraudulent anti-Trump ballots.)
No organization that considers itself a force for good in democracy, and that purports to take the repression of voters seriously, will allow this dangerous claptrap to spread to millions of citizens. Removing this video was meant to be the simplest of easy calls under your rules, but it's still up today.
In a comment to PBS correspondent Yamiche Alcindor, Facebook seemed to be non-committal. While many Republicans think we should follow one path, many Democrats think we should do just the opposite, said a Facebook spokesperson. We have laws in place to protect the legitimacy of the election and freedom of speech, and we will continue to enforce them impartially. The statement does not suggest whether Trump's posts breach the laws of Facebook, and — if they do — why they have not been deleted.
