Angelo Carusone speaks with Univision on how Facebook enabled Trump's misinformation and extreme rhetoric
Published
Citation From Univision programming on May 5, 2021
ANGELO CARUSONE (PRESIDENT, MEDIA MATTERS): They're punting it back to Facebook basically because -- part of it is that Facebook has sort of made a mess of things. And we went back and looked at all 6,018 of Trump's posts from 2020. And what we found was that 24% of them contain misinformation or extreme rhetoric. Hundreds, hundreds of posts violated Facebook's terms of service and they never did anything to enforce it. So I think part of what they're trying to do is force Facebook to draw some kind of a line that could be applied in similar situations. So the punting isn't great.
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CARUSONE: The larger thing is that there's a lot of other Trump-like figures on Facebook right now that are not having the rules applied against them, because what Facebook did when they issued this suspension was they made it based off of these extraordinary circumstances. And so they didn't actually make it about his repeated violations of the rules or covid misinformation or anything like that. They made it because basically it was so connected to the Capitol attack. And so what it actually means is that there's a very large number of people doing similar things that Trump was doing that are getting away scot free right now. Because what Facebook hasn't said is that we are going to start enforcing our rules against this kind of conduct.