Facebook in turmoil over refusal to police Trump's posts
Last updated on: 01 June,2020 09:59 pm
Facebook in turmoil over refusal to police Trump's posts
SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) - The clash between Twitter and Donald Trump has thrust rival Facebook into turmoil, with employees rebelling against CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s refusal to sanction false or inflammatory posts by the US president.
"Mark is wrong, and I will endeavor in the loudest possible way to change his mind," Ryan Freitas, the design director of Facebook’s News Feed, tweeted Sunday, adding that he was organizing about 50 other employees who share his view.
At the root of the discord is Twitter’s unprecedented intervention last week when it tagged two Trump tweets about mail-in ballots with messages urging people to "get the facts."
Zuckerberg reacted by telling Fox News that private social media platforms "shouldn’t be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online." Trump retweeted the interview.
On Friday, Twitter responded once again to a Trump tweet, this time after he used the platform to warn protesters outraged by the death at police hands of an unarmed black man that "when the looting starts, the shooting starts."
Twitter covered up the tweet with a message warning it "violated Twitter Rules about glorifying violence." Viewers had to click on the message to see the underlying tweet.
The message also was posted on Facebook, but Zuckerberg decided to let it stand unchallenged.
"I’ve been struggling with how to respond to the President’s tweets and posts all day," he wrote Friday in a post.
"Personally, I have a visceral negative reaction to this kind of divisive and inflammatory rhetoric."
But, Zuckerberg went on to say that "our position is that we should enable as much expression as possible unless it will cause imminent risk of specific harms or dangers spelled out in clear policies."