The Briefing Room
General Category => Elections 2020 => Topic started by: Hoodat on June 27, 2021, 07:56:51 pm
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Frustration and bewilderment: Emails show tension between Facebook and Biden campaign
Donie O'Sullivan and Dan Merica, CNN | Updated 0007 GMT (0807 HKT) June 24, 2021
(CNN)People working with Joe Biden's presidential campaign repeatedly warned Facebook about violent campaign-related rhetoric on its platform during the heat of the 2020 election, but a series of email exchanges reveals how the social media giant sometimes brushed them off.
A cache of emails obtained by CNN highlight just how worried Democrats had become about misinformation on Facebook as Election Day approached -- and how frustrated they were with Facebook's response. Further, those concerns increased on January 6 when platforms like Facebook and others were used to plan the violent insurrection at the United States Capitol.
And because some of those same top Biden operatives believe little that the tech giant has changed in the past six months, fears are growing about the role Facebook misinformation could play in the 2022 midterms and beyond. Some of the most pressing concerns stemmed from the way former President Donald Trump and his family were using the platform.
In September, a Team Trump account on Facebook posted a video of Donald Trump Jr. baselessly claiming Democrats planned to use "millions of fraudulent ballots" to cheat in the election and called on "able-bodied" people to join an election security "army" for his father.
A senior Biden campaign official emailed Facebook on September 22, "The fact that this video is still on your platform -- and is being used to recruit some sort of, and I quote, 'army for Trump's election security effort' -- is astounding. It is impossible to reconcile this with any of the policies regarding voting and voter suppression that Facebook has released over the past 3 years and emphasized to us privately in several dozen conversations." . . .
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/06/23/politics/facebook-dnc-biden-emails/index.html
So a political campaign put pressure on Facebook to censor their opponents before an election. And CNN's only complaint is that Facebook did not comply 100% of the time with DNC-Biden Campaign demands.