{"id":12128,"date":"2022-08-11T14:44:35","date_gmt":"2022-08-11T14:44:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scienceandnerds.com\/2022\/08\/11\/how-donald-trump-changed-facebook\/"},"modified":"2022-08-11T14:44:36","modified_gmt":"2022-08-11T14:44:36","slug":"how-donald-trump-changed-facebook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scienceandnerds.com\/2022\/08\/11\/how-donald-trump-changed-facebook\/","title":{"rendered":"How Donald Trump changed Facebook"},"content":{"rendered":"

Source: https:\/\/www.theverge.com\/2022\/8\/10\/23300246\/trump-facebook-election-land-of-the-giants<\/a>
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At one point in time, Facebook\u2019s relationship with politicians was relatively uncontroversial.<\/p>\n

But after the 2016 US elections, everything changed.<\/p>\n

Early in the campaign, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump tested the limits of Facebook\u2019s rules against hateful speech at the same time that the company became a vehicle of political exploitation by foreign actors.<\/p>\n

Facebook\u2019s first test: dealing with Trump\u2019s 2015 Facebook post calling for a \u201ctotal and complete shutdown\u201d of Muslims entering the US. While some inside the company saw a strong argument<\/a> that Trump\u2019s comments violated Facebook\u2019s rules against religious hate speech, the company decided to keep the post up. Until then, most Facebook employees had never before grappled with the possibility that their platform could be used to stoke division by a political candidate for the highest position of office.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat do you do when the leading candidate for president posts an attack\u2026on [one of the] the biggest religion[s] in the world?\u201d former Facebook employee and Democratic lobbyist Crystal Patterson told us.<\/p>\n

And it wasn\u2019t just national politicians that Facebook had to worry about but foreign adversaries, too. Despite Mark Zuckerberg\u2019s initial post-election comments dismissing a \u201cpretty crazy idea\u201d that fake news<\/a> on the platform could influence elections, it soon became clear that propaganda from Russian Facebook accounts had reached millions of American voters<\/a> \u2014 causing an unprecedented backlash that forced the company to reckon with its culpability in influencing global politics.<\/p>\n

Over time, Zuckerberg would acknowledge Facebook\u2019s role as the \u201cThe Fifth Estate\u201d \u2014 an entity as powerful as the government and media in shaping the public agenda, while at the same time trying to minimize the company\u2019s role in dictating the acceptable terms of political speech.<\/p>\n

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