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      in US Politics

      Trump’s return to Facebook will ‘fan the flames of hatred’, Democrats say

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      Trump’s return to Facebook will ‘fan the flames of hatred’, Democrats sayDemocrats and liberal groups deplored decision to revoke ban on former president who incited insurrection but ACLU defends move Donald Trump’s return to Facebook and Instagram will “fan the flames of hatred and division”, a Democratic congresswoman said, amid liberal outrage after parent company Meta announced its decision to lift a ban on the former US president imposed after the January 6 Capitol attack.Donald Trump’s Truth Social posts bode ill for his return to FacebookRead moreJan Schakowsky, of Illinois, said: “Reinstating former president Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts will only fan the flames of hatred and division that led to an insurrection.”Trump was impeached for inciting the January 6 riot, a deadly attempt to overturn his defeat by Joe Biden in the 2020 election.Trump was also banned from major social media platforms. His ban from Twitter was lifted in November, after the site was purchased by the Tesla owner, Elon Musk. Trump has not tweeted since, although he is active on his own social media platform and would-be Twitter rival Truth Social.Announcing Meta’s decision, its president of global affairs, the former British deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, told NBC “the rough and tumble of democratic debate should play out on Facebook and Instagram as much as anywhere else”.Schakowsky countered: “The reinstatement of Trump’s accounts show that there is no low [Meta chief executive] Mark Zuckerberg will not stoop to in order to reverse Meta’s cratering revenue and stagnant consumer growth, even if it means destroying our democracy.”Among other Democrats, Adam Schiff, a former House intelligence committee chair, said Trump had “shown no remorse [or] contrition” for January 6, and Facebook had “caved, giving him a platform to do more harm”.Eric Swalwell, like Schiff now barred from the intelligence committee by Republican leaders, said: “We know that [Trump’s] words have power and they inspire, and then the leaders in the Republican party, like Speaker [Kevin] McCarthy, they don’t condemn them. And so when they’re not condemned, they’re a green light and open lane for more violence to occur.”Some liberal groups also scorned the decision.Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters for America, said: “Meta is refuelling Trump’s misinformation and extremism engine … one that will put us on a path to increased violence.”Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or Crew, pointed out that Meta was not bound by constitutional free speech protections.“Facebook is not the government,” he wrote. “The first amendment does not require it to give Donald Trump a platform for speech. And the first amendment does not protect speech to incite an insurrection or overturn an election. The justifications for this are nonsense.”But there was support for Meta among civil liberties groups.Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said: “Like it or not, President Trump is one of the country’s leading political figures and the public has a strong interest in hearing his speech.“The biggest social media companies are central actors when it comes to our collective ability to speak – and hear the speech of others – online. They should err on the side of allowing a wide range of political speech, even when it offends.”Trump used his own platform, Truth Social, to celebrate.‘Reckless’: Fury among rights groups as Facebook lifts Trump banRead moreHe wrote: “Facebook, which has lost billions of dollars in value since ‘deplatforming’ your favorite president, me, has just announced that they are reinstating my account. Such a thing should never again happen to a sitting president, or anybody else who is not deserving of retribution!”CNN reported that Meta said Trump would be “permitted to attack the results of the 2020 election without facing consequences” but would face action if he “were to cast doubt on an upcoming election – like, the 2024 presidential race”.Crew, the ethics watchdog, was not alone in expressing skepticism. It said: “If anyone thinks Donald Trump will rejoin Facebook, then not do the same exact thing he did before, well, they clearly don’t know anything about Donald Trump.”TopicsDonald TrumpFacebookUS politicsDemocratsMetanewsReuse this content More

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      in Elections

      Trump’s Facebook and Instagram ban to be lifted, Meta announces

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      Trump’s Facebook and Instagram ban to be lifted, Meta announcesEx-president to be allowed back ‘in coming weeks … with new guardrails in place’ after ban that followed January 6 attack In a highly anticipated decision, Meta has said it will allow Donald Trump back on Facebook and Instagram following a two-year ban from the platforms over his online behavior during the 6 January insurrection.Meta will allow Trump to return “in coming weeks” but “with new guardrails in place to deter repeat offenses”, Meta’s president of global affairs Nick Clegg wrote in a blogpost explaining the decision.Two more papers found in Trump’s storage last year were marked secretRead more“Like any other Facebook or Instagram user, Mr Trump is subject to our community standards,” Clegg wrote.“In the event that Mr Trump posts further violating content, the content will be removed and he will be suspended for between one month and two years, depending on the severity of the violation.”Trump was removed from Meta platforms following the Capitol riots on 6 January 2021, during which he posted unsubstantiated claims that the election had been stolen, praised increasingly violent protestors and condemned former vice-president Mike Pence even as the mob threatened his life.Clegg said the suspension was “an extraordinary decision taken in extraordinary circumstances” and that Meta has weighed “whether there remain such extraordinary circumstances that extending the suspension beyond the original two-year period is justified”.Ultimately, the company has decided that its platforms should be available for “open, public and democratic debate” and that users “should be able to hear from a former President of the United States, and a declared candidate for that office again”, he wrote.“The public should be able to hear what their politicians are saying – the good, the bad and the ugly – so that they can make informed choices at the ballot box,” he said.As a general rule, we don’t want to get in the way of open debate on our platforms, esp in context of democratic elections. People should be able to hear what politicians are saying – good, bad & ugly – to make informed choices at the ballot box. 1/4— Nick Clegg (@nickclegg) January 25, 2023
      While it is unclear if the former president will begin posting again on the platform, his campaign indicated he had a desire to return in a letter sent to Meta in January.“We believe that the ban on President Trump’s account on Facebook has dramatically distorted and inhibited the public discourse,” the letter said.Safety concerns and a politicized debateThe move is likely to influence how other social media companies will handle the thorny balance of free speech and content moderation when it comes to world leaders and other newsworthy individuals, a debate made all the more urgent by Trump’s run for the US presidency once again.Online safety advocates have warned that Trump’s return will result in an increase of misinformation and real-life violence. Since being removed from Meta-owned platforms, the former president has continued to promote baseless conspiracy theories elsewhere, predominantly on his own network, Truth Social.While widely expected, it still drew sharp rebukes from civil rights advocates. “Facebook has policies but they under-enforce them,” said Laura Murphy, an attorney who led a two-year long audit of Facebook concluding in 2020. “I worry about Facebook’s capacity to understand the real world harm that Trump poses: Facebook has been too slow to act.”The Anti-Defamation League, the NAACP, Free Press and other groups also expressed concern on Wednesday over Facebook’s ability to prevent any future attacks on the democratic process, with Trump still repeating his false claim that he won the 2020 presidential election.“With the mass murders in Colorado or in Buffalo, you can see there is already a cauldron of extremism that is only intensified if Trump weighs in,” said Angelo Carusone, president and CEO of media watchdog Media Matters for America. “When Trump is given a platform, it ratchets up the temperature on a landscape that is already simmering – one that will put us on a path to increased violence.”After the 6 January riots, the former president was also banned from Twitter, Snapchat and YouTube. Some of those platforms have already allowed Trump to return. Twitter’s ban, while initially permanent, was later overruled by its new chief executive Elon Musk. YouTube has not shared a timeline on a decision to allow Trump to return. Trump remains banned from Snapchat. Meta, however, dragged out its ultimate decision. In 2021, CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained in a post Trump had been barred from the platforms for encouraging violence and that he would remain suspended until a peaceful transition of power could take place.While Zuckerberg did not initially offer a timeline on the ban, the company punted its decision about whether to remove him permanently to its oversight board: a group of appointed academics and former politicians meant to operate independently of Facebook’s corporate leadership. That group ruled in May 2021 that the penalties should not be “indeterminate”, but kicked the final ruling on Trump’s accounts back to Meta, suggesting it decide in six months – two years after the riots.The deadline was initially slated for 7 January, and reports from inside Meta suggested the company was intensely debating the decision. Clegg wrote in a 2021 blog post that Trump’s accounts would need to be strictly monitored in the event of his return.How the ‘guardrails’ could workAnnouncing the decision on Wednesday, Clegg said Meta’s “guardrails” would include taking action against content that does not directly violate their community standards but “contributes to the sort of risk that materialized on January 6th, such as content that delegitimizes an upcoming election or is related to QAnon”.Meta “may limit the distribution of such posts, and for repeated instances, may temporarily restrict access to our advertising tools”, Clegg said, or “remove the re-share button” from posts.Trump pleads with Meta to restore Facebook accountRead moreTrump responded to the news with a short statement on Truth Social, reposted by others on Twitter, saying that “such a thing should never happen again to a sitting president” but did not indicate if or when he would return to the platform.It remains to be seen if he will actually begin posting again on the platforms where his accounts have been reinstated. While he initially suggested he would be “staying on Truth [Social]”, his own social media platform, recent reports said he was eager to return to Facebook, formally appealing Meta to reinstate his accounts. But weeks after returning to Twitter, Trump had yet to tweet again. Some have suggested the silence has been due to an exclusivity agreement he has with Truth Social.A report from Rolling Stone said Trump planned to begin tweeting again when the agreement, which requires him to post all news to the app six hours in advance of any other platform, expires in June. Trump has a far broader reach on mainstream social platforms compared to Truth Social, where he has just 5 million followers.Many online safety advocates have warned Trump’s return would be toxic, and Democratic lawmakers on Capitol Hill urged Meta in a December letter to uphold the ban.Representative Adam Schiff, a Democrat who previously chaired the House intelligence committee, criticized the decision to reinstate him.“Trump incited an insurrection,” Schiff wrote on Twitter. “Giving him back access to a social media platform to spread his lies and demagoguery is dangerous.”Trump’s account has remained online even after his ban, but he had been unable to publish new posts. Civil rights groups say that regardless of the former president’s future actions the Meta decision marks a dangerous precedent. “Whether he uses the platforms or not, a reinstatement by Meta sends a message that there are no real consequences even for inciting insurrection and a coup on their channels,” said a group of scholars, advocates and activists calling itself the Real Facebook Oversight Board in a statement. “Someone who has violated their terms of service repeatedly, spread disinformation on their platforms and fomented violence would be welcomed back.”Reuters contributed reportingTopicsDonald TrumpMetaFacebookInstagramUS politicsSocial networkingUS Capitol attacknewsReuse this content More

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      in US Politics

      Trump pleads with Meta to restore Facebook account

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      Trump pleads with Meta to restore Facebook accountFormer president’s lawyers petition company to allow access following ban from platform in wake of 2021 Capitol attack Donald Trump has petitioned Meta to restore his access to Facebook, as he reportedly looks to shift his 2024 presidential campaign into a higher gear.The former president was banned from Facebook more than two years ago, after his followers attacked the US Capitol in an unsuccessful attempt to stop certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election.In a letter to Meta obtained by NBC News on Wednesday, Trump advisers argued that the ban “dramatically distorted and inhibited the public discourse” and should be rescinded.Meta said it would “announce a decision in the coming weeks”.Free the nipple: Facebook and Instagram told to overhaul ban on bare breastsRead moreFacebook and Twitter banned Trump a day after the January 6 attack, which has been linked to nine deaths including suicides among law enforcement.Trump used his Twitter account to encourage supporters to gather near the Capitol. In a speech before the attack, he urged supporters to “fight like hell”. He then used Twitter to criticize his vice-president, Mike Pence, for not stopping certification while the attack was in progress.A congressional committee recommended that Trump be criminally charged in connection with the attack, the fate of hundreds of his supporters.Twitter lifted its ban on Trump after Elon Musk bought the platform last year. But Trump has not tweeted since, choosing to remain on his own rival social media service, Truth Social.NBC quoted an anonymous Republican who said Trump had been bragging about eventually returning to Twitter and predicted the ex-president would do so.Trump’s accounts on Facebook and Twitter have 34 million and nearly 88 million followers respectively. On Truth Social, he has fewer than 5 million followers.Trump used Twitter and Facebook extensively when he ran for the presidency in 2016 and throughout his time in office.Impeached over the Capitol attack but acquitted, Trump announced his 2024 run in mid-November. In doing so he sought to take credit for Republicans winning back the US House in the midterm elections, though their majority was much narrower than expected and many candidates Trump endorsed suffered high-profile defeats.TopicsDonald TrumpMetaFacebookUS politicsRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

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      in US Politics

      Social media giants struggle to tackle misinformation: Politics Weekly America – podcast

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      This week, Jonathan Freedland and Anya van Wagtendonk look at how misinformation could affect the outcome of the midterm elections in November and how tech platforms and lawmakers should be doing more to help stem the erosion of voter confidence in American democracy

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      Watch Anywhere but Washington with Oliver Laughland Buy your tickets to the Guardian’s Politics Weekly America Live event at 8pm GMT on 2 November Listen to the latest series of Comfort Eating with Grace Dent Send your questions and feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com Help support the Guardian by going to theguardian.com/supportpodcasts More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Nick Clegg to decide on Trump’s 2023 return to Instagram and Facebook

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      Nick Clegg to decide on Trump’s 2023 return to Instagram and FacebookMeta’s president of global affairs said it would be a decision ‘I oversee’ after the ex-president’s accounts were suspended in 2021 Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, is charged with deciding whether Donald Trump will be allowed to return to Facebook and Instagram in 2023, Clegg said on Thursday.Speaking at an event held in Washington by news organization Semafor, Clegg said the company was seriously debating whether Trump’s accounts should be reinstated and said it was a decision that “I oversee and I drive”.Judge asks Trump’s team for proof that FBI planted documents at Mar-a-Lago Read moreClegg added that while he will be making the final call, he will consult the CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook board of directors and outside experts.“It’s not a capricious decision,” he said. “We will look at the signals related to real-world harm to make a decision whether at the two-year point – which is early January next year – whether Trump gets reinstated to the platform.”The former president was suspended from a number of online platforms, including those owned by Meta, following the 6 January 2021 Capitol riot during which Trump used his social media accounts to praise and perpetuate the violence.While Twitter banned Trump permanently, Meta suspended Trump’s accounts for two years, to be later re-evaluated. In May 2021, a temporary ban was upheld by Facebook’s oversight board – a group of appointed academics and former politicians meant to operate independently of Facebook’s corporate leadership.However, the board returned the final decision on Trump’s accounts to Meta, suggesting the company decide in six months whether to make the ban permanent. Clegg said that decision will be made by 7 January 2023.Clegg previously served as Britain’s deputy prime minister and joined Facebook as vice‑president for global affairs and communications in 2018. In February, he was promoted to the top company policy executive role.In the years since he began at Meta, Clegg has seen the company through a number of scandals, including scrutiny of its policies during the 2016 US presidential election, Facebook’s role in the persecution of the Rohingya in Myanmar, and the revelations made by whistleblower Frances Haugen.TopicsDonald TrumpNick CleggMark ZuckerbergFacebookInstagramUS Capitol attackUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

    • 63 Shares129 Views

      in World Politics

      The Right to Fair Recollection

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      The Fair Observer website uses digital cookies so it can collect statistics on how many visitors come to the site, what content is viewed and for how long, and the general location of the computer network of the visitor. These statistics are collected and processed using the Google Analytics service. Fair Observer uses these aggregate statistics from website visits to help improve the content of the website and to provide regular reports to our current and future donors and funding organizations. The type of digital cookie information collected during your visit and any derived data cannot be used or combined with other information to personally identify you. Fair Observer does not use personal data collected from its website for advertising purposes or to market to you.As a convenience to you, Fair Observer provides buttons that link to popular social media sites, called social sharing buttons, to help you share Fair Observer content and your comments and opinions about it on these social media sites. These social sharing buttons are provided by and are part of these social media sites. They may collect and use personal data as described in their respective policies. Fair Observer does not receive personal data from your use of these social sharing buttons. It is not necessary that you use these buttons to read Fair Observer content or to share on social media. More

    • 175 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Facebook owner reportedly paid Republican firm to push message TikTok is ‘the real threat’

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      Facebook owner reportedly paid Republican firm to push message TikTok is ‘the real threat’Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram, solicited campaign accusing TikTok of being a danger to American children Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram and other social media platforms, is reportedly paying a notable GOP consulting firm to create public distrust around TikTok.The campaign, launched by Republican strategy firm Targeted Victory, placed op-eds and letters to the editor in various publications, accusing TikTok of being a danger to American children, along with other disparaging accusations.The firm wanted to “get the message out that while Meta is the current punching bag, TikTok is the real threat especially as a foreign owned app that is #1 in sharing data that young teens are using,” wrote a director for the firm in a February email, part of a trove of emails revealed by the Washington Post.“Dream would be to get stories with headlines like ‘From dances to danger: how TikTok has become the most harmful social media space for kids,’” another staffer wrote.Campaign operatives promoted stories to local media, including some unsubstantiated claims, that tied TikTok to supposedly dangerous trends popular among teenagers – despite those trends originating on Facebook.Such trends included the viral 2021 “devious lick” trend, where students vandalized school property. Targeted Victory pushed stories on “devious lick” to local publications in Michigan, Minnesota, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Washington DC. But the trend originally spread on Facebook, according to an investigation by Anna Foley with the podcast Reply All.Campaign workers also used anti-TikTok messages to deflect from criticisms that Meta had received for its privacy and antitrust policies.“Bonus point if we can fit this into a broader message that the current bills/proposals aren’t where [state attorneys general] or members of Congress should be focused,” wrote a Targeted Victory staffer.In a comment to the Post, a TikTok representative said that the company was “deeply concerned” about “the stoking of local media reports on alleged trends that have not been found on the platform”.A Meta representative, Andy Stone, defended the campaign to the Washington Post, saying: “We believe all platforms, including TikTok, should face a level of scrutiny consistent with their growing success.”TopicsTikTokRepublicansFacebookMetaSocial networkingUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

    • 188 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Sandy Hook review: anatomy of an American tragedy – and the obscenity of social media

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      Sandy Hook review: anatomy of an American tragedy – and the obscenity of social media Elizabeth Williamson’s book on the 2012 elementary school shooting is a near-unbearable, necessary indictment of Facebook, YouTube and the conspiracy theories they spreadEven in a country now completely inured to the horrors of mass shootings, the massacre at Sandy Hook remains lodged in the minds of everyone old enough to remember it. Ten years ago, 20-year-old Adam Lanza fired 154 rounds from an AR-15-style rifle in less than five minutes. Twenty extremely young children and six adults were killed.Sandy Hook’s tragic legacy: seven years on, a loving father is the latest victimRead moreIt was the worst elementary school shooting in American history.Elizabeth Williamson’s new book is about that “American Tragedy”, but more importantly it is about “the Battle for Truth” that followed. In excruciating detail, Williamson describes the unimaginable double tragedy every Sandy Hook parent has had to endure: the murder of their child, followed by years and years of an army of online monsters accusing them of inventing this unimaginable horror.Alex Jones of Infowars is the best-known villain of this ghastly narrative. His Facebook pages and YouTube channels convinced millions of fools the massacre was either some kind of government plot to encourage a push for gun control or, even more obscenely, that it was all carried out by actors and no one was killed at all.While a single deranged shooter was responsible for the original tragedy, Williamson makes clear she believes Facebook and Google (the owner of YouTube) deserve most of the blame for the subsequent horror the relatives of victims have endured.As Congressman Ro Khanna reported in his new book, Dignity in a Digital Age, an internal Facebook document estimated that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendations”.Those recommendations are the result of the infernal algorithms which are at the heart of the business models of Facebook and YouTube and are probably more responsible for the breakdown in civil society in the US and the world than anything else invented.“We thought the internet would give us this accelerated society of science and information,” says Lenny Pozner, whose son Noah was one of the Sandy Hook victims. But “really, we’ve gone back to flat earth”.It horrified Pozner “to see the image of his son, smiling in his bomber jacket, passed round by an online mob attacking Noah as a fake, a body double, a boy who never lived”. Relentless algorithms pushed those “human lies to the top” on an internet which has become an “all-powerful booster of outrage and denial”.Noah’s mother, Veronique De la Rosa, was another victim of Jones’s persistent, outrageous lies.“It’s like you’ve entered the ninth circle of hell,” she tells Williamson. “Never even in your wildest, most fear-fueled fantasies would you have guessed you’d find yourself having to fight not only through your grief, which you know is at times paralyzing, but to even prove that your son existed.”Lenny Pozner regularly saw his dead son described as an “alleged victim”, but it took years before Facebook and YouTube and Twitter took substantial action to quiet the insane conspiracies their own algorithms had done so much to reinforce.Facebook allowed a Sandy Hook Hoax group and dozens of others to operate virtually uninterrupted for two years. Hundreds of videos on YouTube, owned by Google, wallowed in the hoax, drawing thousands who made threats against the families.“Facebook and Twitter are monsters,” says Pozner. “Out-of-control beasts run like mom-and-pop shops.”Facebook “focuses on growth, to the exclusion of most everything else”, Williamson writes. The algorithms are designed to keep all of us on the platform as long as possible, and they operate “with relentless, sometimes murderous neutrality, rewarding whatever horrible behavior and false or inflammatory content captures and retains users”.In 2018, an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg by Pozner and De La Rosa, published in the Guardian, accused the Facebook chief of “allowing your platform to continue to be used as an instrument to disseminate hate”.Two days later, Facebook finally suspended Jones’s personal page but “took no action against Infowars’ account, which had 1.7 million followers”. YouTube removed four videos from Infowars’ channel and banned Jones from live-streaming for all of 90 days.An open letter to Mark Zuckerberg from the parents of a Sandy Hook victimRead moreHarry Farid heads the school of Information at the University of California Berkeley. He describes the perfect storm which is threatening democracy and civility everywhere: “You have bad people and trolls and people trying to make money by taking advantage of horrible things … you have social media websites who are not only welcoming and permissive of it but are promoting it, and then you have us, the unsuspecting public.”Williamson makes the important and usually forgotten point that nothing in the first amendment gives anyone the right to use a social media platform. All it says on this subject is that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”As Farid points out, platforms have an absolute right to ban all forms of content “without running afoul of the constitution” – which is why Donald Trump had no judicial recourse when he was banned from Facebook and Twitter after the Capitol riot.But most of the time, Farid says, the platforms just look the other way: “Because they’re making so much goddamned money.”Last fall, the California Democrat Adam Schiff told the Guardian the blockbuster testimony of the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen would finally be enough to spur Congress to regulate the worst excesses of the big platforms. So far, their lobbyists have prevented such action. On Saturday, the Guardian asked Schiff if he still believed Congress might act in this session. “There is still a chance,” he wrote in an e-mail, adding that “the degree of Russian propaganda on social media attempting to justify their bloody invasion of Ukraine” might finally provide the “impetus” needed for change.
      Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for the Truth is published in the US by Dutton Books
      TopicsBooksNewtown shootingGun crimeSocial mediaInternetFacebookYouTubereviewsReuse this content More