Friend, Facebook’s decision to ban Donald Trump was too little, too late.
He spent months using social media to spread baseless -- and as we saw on January 6th, dangerous -- lies about our elections. His posts about “voter fraud” or “#StopTheSteal” -- none of which provided a shred of evidence for their claims -- were shared over 12 million times based on our analysis.
And even though voting rights groups like Common Cause warned Facebook that giving Trump free rein to lie on their platform was a threat to our democracy -- it took the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol to finally move them to action.
Currently, Facebook has "indefinitely suspended" former President Trump’s account… but might be on the cusp of letting him back onto the platform to wreak additional havoc with his disinformation, abuse, and hate speech.
Facebook needs to hear from you directly that they must actually enforce their own civic integrity policies -- and hold violators accountable >>
Facebook has created a new Oversight Board that will review its decision to ban Trump. But by design, the board is accountable to Mark Zuckerberg, not the public. That means it’s no substitute for government action and enforcement to hold Facebook accountable.
The truth is, Facebook shouldn’t hide behind a new Oversight Board to avoid fixing its problems. It just needs to enforce and strengthen the policies it already has. It’s already against their rules to share inaccurate voting information, spread election disinformation, or incite violence at the polls -- all things Trump and his allies repeatedly got away with during the election.
If Facebook is serious about stopping people from using their platform to attack our democracy, they should stop exempting political ads from fact-checking -- which Trump’s campaign took major advantage of. If Facebook is serious about the safety of their users, they must immediately close the loopholes that far-right militias exploited to organize the January 6th insurrection on Facebook in plain sight.
Tell Facebook they need to do more than just keep Trump banned -- they need to actually enforce their policies to protect our democracy.
Remember, Trump is just the biggest offender among literally thousands of bad actors that Facebook allowed to spread disinformation or even incite violence on its platform unchecked.
That’s why we can’t take the bait and go along with their half-measures. If Facebook doesn’t listen to us right now and start enforcing its own civic integrity policies, we’ll need to demand government action that protects our democracy to hold them accountable.
Thank you for speaking up right now.
Yosef Getachew, Director of Media and Democracy
and the team at Common Cause
