POLITICUSUSA
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made a deal with former President Donald Trump’s administration not to fact check Trump’s political posts in exchange for the administration’s word that it would not impose regulations that would affect the company.
So, Facebook’s behavior is a symptom of alienation, and it shouldn’t be any kind of “jaw-dropping” surprise.
Facebook announced that it has taken a stand against disinformation on its platform by banning a
Russian disinformation campaign that claimed that Covid-19 vaccines can turn people into chimpanzees. In addition to that, the campaign also included another phase that questioned the safety of the Pfizer vaccine by sharing a falsified AstraZeneca document.
As soon as Donald Trump filed his lawsuit against Facebook and Twitter, legal experts chimed in that he would open himself to deposition. And the thought it that Trump would not hold up well on a witness stand. But in a recent talk with Bill O‘Reilly, the former president claimed that he is looking forward to being deposed.
O’Reilly began by asking, “Are you lawyers prepared, though, for the war. Because it will be a war, you know that.” Trump replied, “everything’s a war. With me, everything’s a war. And yeah we’re prepared and somebody had to do it. I made a big speech in Florida the other day, we had 48,000 people. And the people are screaming, ‘when are you going to sue social media, big tech.'”
The former president then claimed that he had nothing to do with the Capitol insurrection and said he’d been exonerated by congress.
O’Reilly then asked if Trump would be willing to sit for a deposition. “Sure,” he replied, I look forward to it. I love talking about the election fraud, because it was the most fraudulent election, well I think we’ve had a lot of them, frankly. But it was the most fraudulent election in the history of our country. People know it. Every day we’re finding more and more proof of that.”
Trump may be willing to sit for a deposition, but it certainly wouldn’t make for smart legal strategy. The man has a history of incriminating himself. Just recently, Trump essentially admitted to the claims being made against him by New York prosecutors.
When Donald Trump rose to the presidency in 2016, he did so with lots of help from Twitter and Facebook. Twitter allowed him to post messages directly to his 75 million followers. And Facebook did little to stop the spread of disinformation coming from prominent right wing sites.
But following the January 6th insurrection, Trump was banned from both sites along with any other social media platform that matters. On Wednesday, the former president announced he would be suing Twitter, Google and Facebook. Legal Expert Barbara McQuade later explained why the suit is going nowhere.
McQuade told MSNBC that the case is “dead on arrival.” She also opined that the idea behind the lawsuit is just giving Trump talking points that would get heavy coverage in the media.
The legal expert continued, “
I think that President Trump and his lawyers know it, I think this is more of a PR stunt than a legal case. They know this case will be summarily dismissed, and that just adds to the talking points that even the courts are out to get him.”
Former President Donald Trump will announce class action lawsuits today against Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey over his social media bans. Trump, who is permanently banned from Twitter and has been suspended from Facebook for at least another two years, had his public platforms by the social media companies in the wake of the January 6 insurrection. Since then, he has criticized the bans as censorship, particularly against conservatives.
Trump, who will make the announcement at 11 a.m. today, is supported in his legal challenge by the America First Policy Institute
, a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing Trumpian policies. He will be joined by the group’s president and CEO and board chair, former Trump officials Linda McMahon and Brooke Rollins.
Prominent Republicans slammed a Facebook oversight board’s decision to uphold the tech company’s ban of Donald Trump from its platform.
At the forefront of the outrage was Fox News personality Tomi Lahren, who promised that Trump’s “comeback is going to be bigger than the setback!”
They keep Trump off social media because they know his voice is strong, they know he is the heart and soul of the conservative movement, they know he will not be pushed around and they KNOW the comeback is going to be bigger than the setback! Onward anyway! Screw your platforms!!
Donald Trump has a lot of thoughts about Joe Biden and how he’s handling things. This was made clear this weekend. The former president called into Fox News on multiple occasions this weekend to whine about his successor.
Unfortunately for Trump, the only people who heard his complaints were Fox News viewers. Following the January insurrection that he incited, the 45th president was banned from nearly every relevant social media platform.
But Trump may have found a workaround to his problem. His daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, recently announced that she will be interviewing Trump over her Instagram feed.
Donald Trump is banned from both Instagram on Facebook. But, as of now, it looks like the platforms will allow him to appear via video.
Lara Trump, fresh off the announcement that she’ll now be working for Fox News, told followers, “Alright, everybody, guess what? I have quite a surprise for you later this evening. Guess who’s going to be in that chair. That’s right, you guessed it, my father-in-law, the 45th president of the United States, my father-in-law, president Donald Trump.”
Join me on The Right View tonight — we’ve got a HUGE guest — President Donald Trump!!! Go to https://t.co/oYyNa54jtI at 8pm to watch! 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/AadI56xGFE
— Lara Trump (@LaraLeaTrump) March 30, 2021
It’s quite a turn for Lara. Mary Trump
revealed
On Wednesday, an Atlanta Sheriff held a press conference about the rash of shootings that left 8 dead yesterday. Rather than show empathy for the victims, Jay Baker seemed to be making excuses for the shooter.
The Cherokee Country cop told reporters, “They got that impression, he did understand the gravity and was fed up and at the end of his rope and yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did.”
Cherokee County Sheriff said that it was a really bad day "for him" the Atlanta mass shooter yesterday. What about the 8 people that he killed? Having a bad day does not give a person the right to buy a gun and kill others. pic.twitter.com/V3ywrU9iwv
Facebook’s Oversight Board has confirmed that it received a statement from former President Donald Trump regarding the case of whether or not to keep the ban against him in place.
“We can confirm that a user statement has been received in the case before the Oversight Board concerning President Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts,” a spokesperson said in a statement.
Facebook requested the
board’s “observations or recommendations on suspensions when the user is a political leader,” a sign that the board’s decision on Trump could influence how the platform handles future bans on world leaders.
The Republican party and their cable news surrogates are big on hyperbole. This was seen tonight when multiple GOP Reps. lost their minds over a metal detector placed in the House.
But you can always count on Fox News to take it to the next level. Especially when the segment involves Glenn Beck and Tucker Carlson. On Tuesday night, Beck compared Twitter‘s treatment of Conservatives to Germany‘s treatment of Jews during World War II.
Comparing the current state of social media to Japanese internment, Beck told Carlson, “We made one of the — one of the biggest mistakes of the 20th century by taking our own citizens — and listen to this — confiscating their wealth, making sure they couldn’t work, shutting them down, and then putting them in camps. Tucker, this is the road we’re on again. And it’s not right if it’s the left or the right that is doing it. It’s absolutely un-American.”
After Carlson replied, “That’s right,” Beck continued:
“You can’t have freedom of speech if you can’t have — if you can’t express yourself in a meaningful place. This is — this is like the Germans with the Jews behind the wall. They would put them in the Ghetto. Well, this is the digital ghetto. You — you can talk all you want. Jews, you do whatever you want behind the wall. Well, that’s not meaningful. And that’s where we are. That’s where millions of Americans will be. And again, it’s not to compare it to the Germans. It is not to do anything but warn if you don’t stand up for free speech, you will be the one that loses it as well.”
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.
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.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2021
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.”
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.
When Donald Trump was diagnosed with COVID-19 and subsequently sent to Walter Reed Hospital, no one knew quite how to react. There were a number of possibilities on the table, including the possibility that the president could die of the illness.
Not surprisingly, Joe Biden and his campaign decided to treat the matter with empathy and concern. Almost immediately, the Democrats announced that they would be pulling negative ads against Trump for a period of 14 days.
But Donald Trump has not been your average COVID-19 sufferer. And the Trump campaign was pretty clear that they did not plan on removing any of their negative ads.
Still Joe Biden wrote on Twitter, “This cannot be a partisan moment. It must be an American moment. We have to come together as a nation.”
And now that Trump is back to working in the Oval Office, despite the fact that he is still highly contagious with a deadly virus, the Biden campaign has decided that they will go back on the attack.
Spokesman Michael Gwin explained the decision:
“Our campaign has always been about making the positive case for Joe Biden, but there’s a stark contrast between Vice President Biden and Donald Trump and their visions for our country. We’re going to continue to make a full-throated case for Vice President Biden and we will forcefully correct the record when Trump attacks and lies.”
“Our campaign has always been about making the positive case for Joe Biden, but there's a stark contrast between Vice President Biden and Donald Trump and their visions for our country,” said @MichaelJGwin in a statement. pic.twitter.com/elblnB5erh
Democrat Joe Biden’s campaign has criticized Facebook for not removing false or misleading posts by President Donald Trump’s account. The president has used his social media channels to spread conspiracy theories about the presidential race, particularly about mail-in voting, which he insists would “rig” the general election.
“Earlier this month, Facebook committed to finally acting on its ‘responsibility to protect our democracy’ by ‘clearing up confusion about how this election will work’ and by ‘fight[ing] misinformation’ about how to participate. On the same day, Mr. Trump took to your platform to spread falsehoods about mail voting, and Facebook took no meaningful action. We were told then that Facebook was working to determine how best to apply its new, more aggressive approach,” reads a letter from Biden campaign manager
Jen O’Malley Dillon. “Three weeks have now passed. Rather than seeing progress, we have seen regression. Facebook’s continued promise of future action is serving as nothing more than an excuse for inaction. Millions of people are voting. Meanwhile, your platform is the nation’s foremost propagator of disinformation about the voting process. This state of affairs cannot be reconciled with a single public statement your company has made about these issues.”
Julia Louis-Dreyfuss made a joke about it last week when emceeing the Democratic National Convention last week. “If we all vote, there is nothing Facebook, Fox News and Vladimir Putin can do to stop us,” she said.
Facebook has been somewhat problematic politically over the years. White Nationalist groups have also used the site to organize violence.
Earlier this week, a teenager named Kyle Rittenhouse shot 3 people in Kenosha, Wisconsin killing two of them. While there were militia calls to “defend Kenosha” it is not known yet whether one of these calls inspired the teen to Kenosha.
Following the shooting, journalists zeroed in on a post from a group called Kenosha Guard. The post, published on , asked, “any patriots [are] willing to take up arms and defend our city tonight from the evil thugs?”
Facebook employees are furious and unloaded on Mark Zuckerberg during an all-hands meeting yesterday over his handling of QAnon and a Kenosha militia page that remained online after a shooting that killed two people. Here's my dispatch from inside: https://t.co/J5RfBM0lEk
Appearing on Geraldo Rivera’s radio show earlier today on WTAM in Cleveland, President Donald Trump insisted he is being unfairly censored by Twitter and Facebook after the social media companies blocked a video shared by accounts linked to him and his campaign for spreading misinformation about the coronavirus.
Matt Gaetz is calling for a criminal investigation of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg for allegedly lying to Congress about social media bias against conservative.
The Republican congressman has written to Attorney General William Barr accusing Zuckerberg of making false statements during congressional appearances.
Gaetz claims Zuckerberg “repeatedly and categorically denied any bias against conservative speech, persons, policies or politics.”
“On both occasions, members of Congress asked Mr. Zuckerberg about allegations that Facebook censored and suppressed content supportive of President Donald Trump and other conservatives,” Gaetz wrote.
“Mr. Zuckerberg also dismissed the suggestion that Facebook exercises any form of editorial manipulation.”
Zuckerberg denied allegations that Facebook targets conservatives during a Senate appearance in 2018.
“I understand where that concern is coming from, because Facebook and the tech industry are located in Silicon Valley, which is an extremely left-leaning place,” Zuckerberg said at the time.
“And this is actually a concern that I have, and that I try to root out in the company, is making sure that we don’t have any bias in the work that we do. And I think it is a fair concern that people would at least wonder about.”
There is very little evidence of systemic bias against conservative content on social media. However, Republicans have continued to push the issue and used congressional power to do so.
Follow Darragh Roche on Twitter
Dr. Anthony Fauci has responded to Donald Trump’s attacks on him in an early morning TV appearance. He defended himself from the President’s attacks as they took on a new, more pernicious form.
Trump shared a tweet on Monday that falsely claimed Covid-19 had a cure but the fact was being covered up. He also shared tweets pushing hydroxochloroquine and criticizing Fauci.
One video the President shared was later pulled by Facebook and Twitter for containing false information about Coronavirus.
The infectious diseases expert addressed these criticisms on ABC’s Good Morning America.
Watch the video:
Dr. Anthony Fauci to @GStephanopoulos: “I don't tweet. I don't even read them so I don't really want to go there. I just will continue to do my job no matter what comes out because I think it's very important.” https://t.co/JgCvhTifYS pic.twitter.com/BJGIqwSjuT
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg says organizing protests against stay-at-home orders on the social media site is misinformation. The remarks come as some conservatives have taken to the streets.
The Facebook CEO spoke to Good Morning America’s George Stephanopoulos on Monday. He confirmed his site would take a dim view of the protests.
“If somebody trying to organize something like that, does that qualify as harmful misinformation?” Stephanopoulos asked.
“We do classify that as harmful misinformation and we take that down,” Zuckerberg said.
Watch the video:
ABC NEWS EXCLUSIVE: Facebook teams up with researchers to help collect data on novel coronavirus in an effort to better equip health officials and the public moving forward amid the pandemic. https://t.co/goJzt9qVfT pic.twitter.com/A0KqrzT4Ru
The Federalist Society's black tie attendees were blasted with Dr. Christine Blasey Ford's disturbing testimony about Justice Kavanaugh's sexual assault as they entered the annual gala at which Kavanaugh was the keynote speaker.