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Thursday, April 25, 2024

Has Facebook become a political actor?

By: V4 Agency

Although plenty of apparently fraudulent incidents surrounding the US presidential election are currently being investigated, some of Donald Trump’s posts have received warning labels by the social media giant to the effect that postal voting is trustworthy and that incidents of election fraud are very rare. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was heard by the US Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday. Twitter chief Jack Dorsey admitted before the Committee to blocking some news about Joe Biden and his son.

Facebook, the largest social media platform, seems to be meddling in politics. The screenshot below shows a Facebook post by Donald Trump saying that Democrats could have cheated in the presidential elections, as dead people also voted. Facebook added a warning note to the post.

The note read: “both voting by post and voting in person have a long history of trustworthiness in the US.” Facebook added that voter fraud was extremely rare.

In another post, Trump wrote that Michigan was yet to certify the election results. The note Facebook placed below the post said that Joe Biden was the projected winner of this year’s US presidential elections.

These warnings by Facebook are rather interesting in light of the fact that investigations in several cases of fraud are under way. Due to the controversies, Donald Trump’s legal team has filed lawsuits in several states to challenge the results. Several cases were reported, for instance, about ballots cast on behalf of deceased people, windows overlooking a vote-counting room being covered, and issues also emerged around the Dominion voting software. The ballot counting software is suspected of inflating vote totals for Biden. “It was designed to rig elections,” Sidney Powell, a member of the Trump legal team said.

Facebook is not the only social media site which has adopted this dubious moderation practice. During the elections, Twitter even censored some of Trump’s tweets. They could not be seen at first unless users clicked on “view” to read the entries. This was an attempt by Twitter to warn people that the tweet may include false information about the elections and election frauds. Twitter continues to flag the posts concerning the elections on the president’s account.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey testified before the Senate Judiciary Committe on Tuesday. Both CEOs were grilled over their practice of censorship related to this year’s election.

Twitter’s CEO admitted that it was wrong to block the link to a New York Post article about Joe Biden’s son. The social media platform blocked users from sharing the Post’s article, warning that the link to the article is harmful.
Mark Zuckerberg said at the hearing that Facebook took its responsibility to guard the integrity of the elections very seriously. They tried to make sure that false information about the elections did not appear on the social media platform and displayed warnings to millions posts.
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