U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren wants to know what Donald Trump and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg talked about during their Oval Office meeting last month. Warren, who’s leading the Democratic race along with Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, even suggested in a series of tweets Tuesday that Facebook may have changed one of its policies against misinformation in order to appease Trump.
“Facebook has incredible power to affect elections and our national debate. Mark Zuckerberg is telling employees that he views a Warren administration as an ‘existential’ threat to Facebook. The public deserves to know how Facebook intends to use their influence in this election,” Warren tweeted on Monday. “For instance, Trump and Zuckerberg met at the White House two weeks ago. What did they talk about?”
Senator Warren warned that Facebook has a tremendous amount of power, the ability to swing elections, and she even brought up recently leaked audio that showed Zuckerberg is terrified of a potential Warren presidency. Zuckerberg said that he would sue the U.S. government if Warren tried to break up Big Tech companies, a sentiment that Zuckerberg has not echoed whenever the company has been attacked by Trump.
Zuck’s meeting with Trump occurred on September 20, though we don’t know what exactly was discussed. What we do know is that it wasn’t long before Facebook changed its ad policies to allow some objectively false information on its platform as long as those ads were bought by politicians.
“After that meeting, Facebook quietly changed its policies on ‘misinformation’ in ads, allowing politicians to run ads that have already been debunked by independent, non-partisan fact-checkers,” Warren tweeted. “Put another way, Facebook is now ok with running political ads with known lies.”
They’re allowing Trump to spend over $1 million a week right now for ads on their platform—including ones that air the same lies that TV stations won’t. Here’s an example of an ad that Facebook let Trump run despite being obviously untrue: https://t.co/sQdKCmrkOr pic.twitter.com/2X2S95Ep0H
— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) October 7, 2019
CNN has rejected at least two TV ads from the Trump regime that contained obvious lies about Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, but Facebook has allowed those same ads on its platform. Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday.
Trump’s reelection campaign spends millions on Facebook ads to reach potential voters and the increasingly authoritarian leader of the U.S. has significantly increased spending on Facebook ever since the Democrats started impeachment proceedings.
“Facebook already helped elect Donald Trump once because they were asleep at the wheel while Russia attacked our democracy — allowing fake, foreign accounts to run ad campaigns to influence our elections,” Warren tweeted.
Zuckerberg has repeatedly argued that Facebook is only in a position to combat abuse on its platform because it’s so large. The tech CEO, who has made billions off the private information of users, insists that breaking up the company wouldn’t do anything positive for society.
But Warren is calling on Facebook executives to come answer congressional questions under oath about the policies that it’s implementing and the potential impact those policies will have on the 2020 presidential election.
“We need accountability,” Warren tweeted. “That should start with Congress and the appropriate state authorities opening investigations and conducting hearings to make Facebook executives explain the company’s policies and practices — under oath.”