Warren turns up heat in battle with Facebook
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a top-tier Democratic presidential candidate, is turning up the heat in her battle with one of the most powerful tech companies in the world, Facebook, as she shines a spotlight on the company’s rules on political ads.
Warren’s campaign ran an ad promoting a false claim about Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg over the weekend, highlighting the challenge the company confronts as it works to stave off disinformation while also sidestepping questions about the veracity of political arguments.
Critics have argued that Facebook is abdicating responsibility over its powerful platform, which reaches more than 2 billion people globally, while the company and free speech advocates have insisted it’s risky for Facebook to take more control over what political candidates are allowed to say.
“The policies they’ve announced are an explicit invitation to politicians to spread falsehoods,” Paul Barrett, the deputy director of the New York University’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, told The Hill. “And that is not something that we ought to applaud.”
Warren’s move: Warren’s advertisement, placed on Friday, taunted Facebook by claiming Zuckerberg had endorsed President Trump.
“Breaking news: Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook just endorsed Donald Trump for re-election,” Warren’s campaign wrote in the first line of a Facebook advertisement, which featured a picture of President Trump and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg shaking hands. “You’re probably shocked, and you might be thinking, ‘How could this possibly be true?'”
“Well, it’s not,” the advertisement reads. “But what Zuckerberg *has* done is given Donald Trump free rein to lie on his platform — and then to pay Facebook gobs of money to push out their lies to American voters.”
Facebook’s response: According to Facebook’s archives, the post has accrued hundreds of thousands of views and cost Warren’s campaign thousands of dollars to run.
Facebook, though, is not backing down.
“If Senator Warren wants to say things she knows to be untrue, we believe Facebook should not be in the position of censoring that speech,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement Saturday.
The larger fight: Warren’s ad was a shot at Facebook’s handling of another controversy involving a Trump campaign advertisement accusing former Vice President Joe Biden of corruption without proof
Cable networks, most prominently CNN, refused to run the ad based on their policies against promoting lies. But Facebook has refused to remove the ad.
In letters, statements and its official policies, Facebook has emphasized that it believes politicians should be exempt from many of its rules on speech.
