A top member of President-elect Joe Biden’s staff beamed up in a fiery Twitter thread on Facebook on Monday, claiming that Facebook continues to pose a threat to democracy.
Bill Russo, a deputy director of campaign communications, accused the social media giant led by Mark Zuckerberg of continuing to promote political disinformation after Biden’s election victory over President Trump.
“We’ve been asking Facebook to seriously address these issues for over a year. They have not. Our democracy is at stake. We need answers,” Russo twittered.
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To give a possible insight into how the new government will view the powerful social network – a key advertising tool of the campaign – Russo has apparently also deleted an anti-facebook tweet that was sent after Biden’s victory speech on Saturday.
As the Financial Times reported, Russo had passed on a picture uploaded by comedian Sacha Baron Cohen showing President Trump shaking hands with Zuckerberg along with the caption: “One down, one to go. Russo added, “Hell, yeah.”
Baron Cohen remains a fierce Facebook critic and was an advocate of the “Stop Hate for Profit” campaign, which advocated an end to advertising earlier this year.
According to the Financial Times, Biden’s transition team includes former Deputy Attorney General of Facebook, Jessica Hertz, and former Apple’s Vice President for Government Affairs, Cynthia Hogan. Former Google boss Eric Schmidt was also approached to possibly lead a technology industry task force, the newspaper reported.
We knew that this would happen. We pleaded with Facebook for over a year to seriously address these issues. They did not.
Our democracy is at stake. We need answers.
– Bill Russo (@BillR) November 10, 2020
One less. One is still missing. pic.twitter.com/eQYi1pBqku
– Sacha Baron Cohen (@SachaBaronCohen) November 7, 2020
Throughout the campaign, the Biden Team was critical of Facebook and repeatedly called for more aggressive moderation in the face of false information and conspiracy theories.
In a letter to Zuckerberg in September, campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon branded the site as the “leading propagator” of electoral disinformation in the country.
In his Monday’s Twitter thread, Russo said Facebook “is tearing the fabric of our democracy to shreds” and cited a series of alleged failures that are said to have taken place over the past week.
He said articles from the right-wing news channel Breitbart were allowed to spread misinformation about electoral fraud, which the Trump campaign has used in recent days to challenge the outcome of the presidential election.
Russo said Facebook added links to a briefing held by White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany Monday, which Fox News decided to cut off because she was spreading unconfirmed allegations of election fraud, a “regrettably ineffective, sealable sticker.
It accused the site of slow to stop conspiracy theorists from mobilizing in “Stop the Steal” groups that could attract hundreds of thousands of users.
The Washington Post reported on Monday that a seven-page collection of “Stop the Steal” messages – allegations of election fraud and questioning of the election results – had been taken offline and linked to former Trump consultant Steve Bannon.
The analysis shows that Facebook is “absolutely teeming with right-wing misinformation,” said New York Times technology columnist Kevin Roose this week, citing NewsWhip data that lists the highest-traffic URLs posted on the platform between Monday and today:
Facebook is absolutely teeming with right-wing misinformation at the moment. These all belong to the 10 most visited URLs published on the platform in the last 24 hours (according to @NewsWhip data) pic.twitter.com/WlTR10fRBE
– Kevin Roose (@kevinroose) November 10, 2020
The tricky thing for Facebook is that some of the most viral stories are not strictly false. (Perdue Loeffler *has* demanded the resignation of the SOS.) But they’re feeding a stolen campaign description that will be hard to vote back.
– Kevin Roose (@kevinroose) November 10, 2020
It remains unclear how Facebook will be treated under the next presidency, although
A candidate Biden had previously indicated that he would not make it easy for himself with the Websi
