Last updated on January 14th, 2021 at 03:37 am
Social media has played an outsized role in the rise of Donald Trump. The president was an early adopter of Twitter and has millions of followers on the platform.
Facebook, of course, let fake information and news stories run rampant on its site during the 2016 election, helping to propel Trump to victory over Hilary Clinton.
For the first 3 years of Trump’s presidency, both sites continued to let Trump flout their rules and regulations while going unchecked. Twitter finally stood up in 2020 and began to mark Trump’s false tweets with a disclaimer. Facebook has been slow to do the same.
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But on Wednesday, with Trump’s seditionists storming America’s capital, Mark Zuckerberg‘s company finally decided to take action.
After hours of silence, Donald Trump posted a video urging his supporters to go home. At the same time, Trump continued to make false claims about winning the election in a landslide.
Twitter immediately flagged the video and disabled liking, sharing or retweeting the message. Facebook has pulled it down entirely.
Guy Rosen, the company’s Vice President of Integrity explained, “This is an emergency situation and we are taking appropriate emergency measures, including removing President Trump’s video. We removed it because on balance we believe it contributes to rather than diminishes the risk of ongoing violence.”
The White House has yet to respond to the actions of the two social media giants.
Todd Neikirk is a New Jersey based politics and technology writer. His work has been featured in psfk.com, foxsports.com and hillreporter.com. He enjoys sports, politics, comic books and spending time at the shore with his family.
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