Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made a secret deal with President Donald Trump. He is turning a blind eye to his lies and inflammatory posts in hopes that Facebook will not become the president's next target...
Rumors like the one above have been circulating for months, but Zuckerberg himself denied them, citing Axios that there is no such agreement.
"I've heard that rumor, too, so let me be clear: There is no deal," Zuckerberg said. "Actually, the whole idea of a deal is pretty ridiculous."
Mark Zuckerberg's remarks come in response to growing concerns about Zuckerberg's relationship with the president, which remain cordial despite concerns about the president's misuse of social media.
NBC News reported last year that Trump hosted Mark Zuckerberg at a secret dinner at the White House. The dinner took place just a week after Zuckerberg in a speech confirmed that Facebook will not control political ads, giving Trump the permission to share misleading videos, advertisements and posts to the largest social network of the world.
Since then, the president and his supporters have started using Facebook as a tool, sharing videos of campaigns and lies about postal voting (mail-in ballots.). There have also been incidents in which Facebook seems to have escaped completely and has not removed misleading news posted by politicians.
Just this week, one research published by HEATED and Popular Information revealed that Facebook stopped fact-checking in a "partially false" article on climate change published by the right news site The Daily Wire.
Η refusal του Facebook να αφαιρέσει ορισμένες αναρτήσεις, όπως την απάντηση του Trump για τις διαμαρτυρίες στη Μινεάπολη κατά της ρατσιστικής αστυνομικής βίας ("όταν ξεκινά η λεηλασία, ξεκινούν οι πυροβολισμοί") σίγουρα έχει κοστίσει στην company. Currently faces employee strikes and boycott of advertisers because of her refusal to put limits on what the President writes.
Roger McNamee, a venture capitalist, early Facebook investor and now well-known critic of the company, said to the New York Times last month that he believed the two had some sort of deal. McNamee said the agreement was "probably implied rather than explicit" and "extremely utilitarian", but also mutually beneficial.
McNamee reported: "Trump needs Facebook's thumb to win these elections".
To support McNamee's claim, the Times reported that the Justice Department-led antitrust investigations into US tech giants appear to be very flexible and polite to Zuckerberg's company.
Zuckerberg and Facebook's response to the accusations of a deal was to highlight the various disagreements they had with the White House on issues such as immigration policy and climate change. Speaking to Axios about dinner with Trump last year, the Facebook CEO said:
"Αποδέχτηκα την πρόσκληση για δείπνο επειδή ήμουν στην πόλη και επειδή είναι ο πρόεδρος των Ηνωμένων Πολιτειών. Είχα επίσης πολλά γεύματα και συναντήσεις με τον Πρόεδρο Ομπάμα ... τόσο στον Λευκό Οίκο όσο και έξω, συμπεριλαμβανομένης και της διοργάνωσης μιας εκδήλωσης για αυτόν στο Facebook HQ" ανέφερε ο Zuckerberg στο Axios.
But just because there is no formal (or even tacit) agreement does not mean that the interests of Zuckerberg and Trump are not aligned. Zuckerberg wants to avoid accusations of anti-conservative prejudice and thorough antitrust investigations, while Trump wants to keep saying what he wants to say to the American public without fear of censorship.
But as a recent report from The Washington Post reports, Zuckerberg has been shaping Facebook's rules to match Trump's rhetoric for some time now. In 2015, as Trump began to gain supporters as a candidate, he posted a video on Facebook in which he said he wanted to ban Muslims from entering the United States. According to the publication, the video angered many Facebook employees who said it violated the company's policies on hate speech, but Zuckerberg ultimately let the video stand because of the "newness" of a standard that would become policy in 2016.
In other words, if Zuckerberg has made a deal with Trump, he has for a long time.
Published on TheVerge
