Four members across the House and Senate wrote in a new letter to a top official at the parent company running Facebook that the site should maintain strong standards against the promotion of content spreading deception about the country’s elections, keep Trump off the platform, and expand the application of Facebook standards on potentially dangerous content to others posting lies.
The letter, which is from Democratic Reps. Adam Schiff (Calif.), André Carson (Ind.), and Kathy Castor (Fla.), alongside Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), notes Republican candidates running in statewide elections in this year’s midterms were relatively free to post content denying the security of U.S. elections. Real-world circumstances have, of course, already shown this sort of rhetoric leading to life-threatening violence. The letter notes recent reporting outlining how posts from a dozen and a half candidates denying the security of the 2020 election persisted — in at least large part on Facebook — without any kind of restriction or note about the content. (Twitter was included in the reporting.) As for Trump, his previous suspension from the site wasn’t originally made permanent, but as it comes back up for consideration next month two years after the Capitol riot, Schiff and the others want it extended.
“For Meta to credibly maintain a legitimate election integrity policy, it is essential that your company maintain its platform ban on former president Trump,” the Dems told Meta’s head of global affairs, Nick Clegg. “Two years later, we can see unequivocally that Trump is still spreading the Big Lie and thus undermining our democracy. Indeed, he has expressed support for pardoning people involved in the January 6th attack on police, should he ever get the chance.”
Trump also posted on his alternative social media site Truth Social in support of releasing all those detained in connection to the riot, without making any distinction between those charged with violent offenses — some of which get just startling in Capitol riot cases — and non-violent offenders. Neither did he then distinguish between those in pretrial detention and defendants already sentenced after guilty pleas or verdicts. Some of the specific examples cited by Schiff and the other Dems include Trump amplifying accounts associated with QAnon on Truth Social — a conspiracy theory that Facebook restricts.
Trump, of course, recently made an expected confirmation of his hopes to win the 2024 Republican nomination for president, although he hasn’t really done much to further his campaign since the announcement. His social media commentary could once again end up with a heightened importance the closer he gets to the presidency, just like the country could be reintroduced to his financial corruption. Recent reporting outlined over half a dozen loans to which Trump was a party that he at least initially didn’t include on his financial disclosure forms. The list included nearly $20 million owed to a South Korean company that was suddenly paid off in July of the first year of his tenure and loans well into the millions he provided each of his children.
The new letter from Schiff and the other Democratic members of Congress asked Clegg a series of specific questions, like the nature of criteria for re-examining Trump’s suspension and if recently reported layoffs at Meta affect “the misinformation, election integrity or foreign malign influence teams.”
After inciting a violent insurrection, Donald Trump was suspended from Facebook.
That suspension is set to expire in just 24 days – despite the fact that he's more unhinged and dangerous than ever.@SenWhitehouse and I are calling on Meta to keep Trump offline. For good.
— Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) December 14, 2022
