The Biden campaign doesn’t believe Facebook is doing enough to censor President Trump.
In a letter to Facebook’s vice president for global affairs and communications Nick Clegg on Monday, Biden’s campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon criticized the tech giant for “haggling” with the White House and requesting “edits and deletions” of Trump’s posts about the George Floyd protests, rather than removing them entirely.
She specifically asked Facebook to remove posts from President Trump that suggest a connection between mail-in ballots and voter fraud. Dillon insisted that such posts were unfounded and constituted voter suppression. Meanwhile, in a special election in New Jersey last month nearly a fifth of ballots collected were discovered to be fraudulent.
On Friday, Facebook announced a policy to censor posts that incite violence or suppress voters. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had previously spoken in favor of allowing controversial political speech on his platform, and had criticized Twitter for censoring the president. But after heavy backlash from advertisers, Zuckerberg now says the company will label posts that appear to be “hate speech” and will take down posts that amount to voter suppression or inciting violence going forward.
This isn’t the first time the Biden campaign has tried to use social media platforms to go after the president. After months of pressuring Facebook privately, Biden encouraged his supporters to sign a petition asking Facebook to tighten its rules on disinformation earlier in June. In response, Facebook maintained that “the people’s elected representatives should set the rules, and we will follow them…we will protect political speech, even when we strongly disagree with it.”
Now, Facebook has decided to make the rules after all. Whether the tech giant will cave entirely to the Biden campaign’s demands remains to be seen.
No comments:
Post a Comment