Emails that have now surfaced show that Joe Biden campaign officials pressured Facebook to censor his opponent, Donald Trump – specifically the Team Trump account – ahead of the 2020 US presidential election.
CNN writes about this, framing this revelation as proof that misinformation and what it calls “violent rhetoric” was rampant on Facebook and not properly addressed by the giant – rather than what others will see as proof of concerning levels of undue influence politicians tried to exert on the world’s biggest social media platform.
The report said that the emails show Democrats had become very worried about “misinformation” – and apparently very unhappy with an uncooperative Facebook, what a former Biden campaign staffer said “essentially did nothing” when faced with a barrage of public and private complaints and letters coming from the party.
Not only the election but also the January 6 breach in Washington DC are thrown in as yet more evidence that Facebook was not diligent enough in suppressing and censoring information, because it allowed protesters to use it to plan their activities (at the time, though, legacy media like CNN accused independent alternative platforms as hubs for this, leading the charge in what resulted in wiping some of them off the social media map).
Some might wonder what makes CNN play the risky game of effectively unmasking the Biden campaign as privately putting pressure on Facebook to act in a certain way, and the answer may be – in order to put on yet more pressure, this time with the 2022 midterm elections in mind.
One of the emails that have now been made public concerns a video posted by Team Trump showing Donald Trump Jr. accusing Democrats of planning to rig the election, and calling on Trump supporters to rally around their candidate to oppose this. Facebook slapped a label on the video, but that was not enough for Democrats.
In order to get the video banned, a senior Biden campaign figure wrote to Facebook on September 22, cautioning the giant that it was not implementing its own policies around “voter suppression” – that Democrats were apparently previously privately assured would be enforced. At one point the email “implores” Facebook to approach the issue with “a sense of mission.”
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