As congressional investigators pursue evidence that Russia used Facebook ads and fake user content to influence last year’s election, President Trump struck back Wednesday morning with a tweet asserting — on no apparent evidence — that the social media company was part of a media cabal against him.
He accompanied the charge with his familiar claim that “the people were pro-Trump,” overlooking the fact that millions more Americans voted for his opponent, and repeated his boast about his accomplishments in office, on the day after his signature campaign promise to repeal Obamacare died, again, in the Senate.
Trump’s reference to the New York Times having “apologized” for its coverage presumably alludes to a letter from the publisher and executive editor to their readers in the aftermath of Trump’s upset over Clinton last November. In the Nov. 13 letter, they questioned whether Trump’s “sheer unconventionality” led them — and other media outlets — to underestimate his support among American voters. They also expressed a desire to “rededicate” their newsroom to the paper’s fundamental mission: “To report America and the world honestly, without fear or favor, striving always to understand and reflect all political perspectives and life experiences in the stories that we bring to you.” The right-wing blogosphere and Trump chose to interpret this as a tacit admission of bias.
Facebook does not run editorials or commission its own articles, although its proprietary algorithms play a role in determining what content users will see. A former Facebook employee claimed last year that the designation of certain topics as “trending” was manipulated to downplay conservative opinion, but that allegation has not been substantiated.
Trump has tweeted many times, most recently last week, that special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible collusion between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign is a “hoax” and a “witch hunt.”
Special Counsel and Former FBI Director Robert Mueller (C) leaves after briefing members of the Senate Judiciary Committee on the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 US presidential election, on Capitol Hill in Washington, June 21, 2017. (Photo: Michael Reynolds/EPA/REX/Shutterstock).
The U.S. intelligence community says that Moscow launched a multilayered campaign of deception and propaganda to disrupt American democracy and tilt last year’s presidential election in Trump’s favor.
“The Russia hoax continues, now it’s ads on Facebook. What about the totally biased and dishonest Media coverage in favor of Crooked Hillary?” Trump wrote on Twitter on Sept. 22.
“The greatest influence over our election was the Fake News Media ‘screaming’ for Crooked Hillary Clinton,” he continued. “Next, she was a bad candidate!”
Much like Trump’s successful appropriation of the phrase “fake news,” the accusation that some form of conspiracy transformed Facebook into a hub of anti-Trump propaganda reverses what insiders say actually happened.
Facebook recently admitted that it had sold $100,000 worth of political ads to hundreds of fake accounts with connections to a notorious Russian “troll farm” in St. Petersburg between June 2015 and May 2017. These ads generally praised Trump while deriding his opponent, Democrat Hillary Clinton. It’s illegal for foreign interests to purchase political ads in the U.S.
Facebook has already turned over more than 3,000 “secretly sponsored” ads to Mueller. But the social media giant has refused to release them publicly — citing internal policies to protect the privacy of users.
“When we recently uncovered this activity, we provided that information to the special counsel. We also briefed Congress — and this morning I directed our team to provide the ads we’ve found to Congress as well,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks at his company’s annual F8 developer conference, Tuesday, April 18, 2017, in San Jose, Calif. (Photo: Noah Berger/AP)
“As a general rule, we are limited in what we can discuss publicly about law enforcement investigations, so we may not always be able to share our findings publicly. But we support Congress in deciding how to best use this information to inform the public, and we expect the government to publish its findings when their investigation is complete.”
Back in January 2016, however, Trump had a much warmer view of the platform, tweeting about how he completely dominated Facebook conversations.
Facebook did not respond to a request for comment from Yahoo News.
(Source Yahoo.com, Contributors: Increase Chisom)
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