The Joe Biden for President Campaign is hopping mad at Facebook and its founder Mark Zuckerberg. The campaign accuses Facebook of not living up to its own standards and of not keeping its promises to remove fake news. The accusation came in the form of a letter sent by the Biden 2020 campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon to Mark Zuckerberg, Axios has reported.
Much was made of how fake news played a crucial part in Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory. Such news proliferated on social media and accused Hilary Clinton of just about anything from murder to sex trafficking, Facebook was accused of being the worst offender in allowing these stories and slanders to spread and since then the company has promised to do a better job of self-policing.
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Just last week the company announced the start of a committee to review all such news posting. But it will not take effect in time for the 2020 elections. And even if it were to go into effect today it may be a matter of too little too late.
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Cook Political Report has shifted its 2020 presidential election outlook for Ohio and Iowa — two key battleground states that Trump won in 2016 — moving them from “lean Republican” to “toss up.”https://t.co/YDzoaIpwkL
— Axios (@axios) September 29, 2020
So what got the Biden Campaign so angry at Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook? This time the campaign says that Facebook failed to take appropriate action against what it says is a disinformation campaign on the part of President Trump to discredit mail in voting. It has been widely reported that the President has made numerous false claims about attempts to engage in fraudulent voting through the mail.
Anyway the letter from Jen O’Malley Dillon had a lot of harsh words for Mr. Zuckerberg.
“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,” she wrote.
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The Biden campaign is pressing Facebook to remove misleading posts by Trump — and slamming the platform as “the nation’s foremost propagator of disinformation about the voting process”. https://t.co/8Zd6pPINAl
— Axios (@axios) September 29, 2020
“Mr. Trump took to your platform to spread falsehoods about mail voting, and Facebook took no meaningful action,” accused Jen O’Malley Dillon. “We were told then that Facebook was working to determine how best to apply it’s new, more aggressive approach.”
“By now Mr. Trump clearly understands that Facebook will not hold him to their clearly stated policies. Facebook has committed to not allow that voice to be drowned out by a storm of disinformation, but has failed at every opportunity to follow through on that commitment.
O’Malley Dillon finished with somewhat of a threat saying, “Facebook’s continued promise of future action is serving as nothing more than an excuse for inaction. We will be calling out those failures as they occur over the coming 36 days,”
