Facebook is reportedly planning for Trump to meddle with election results

[ThinkingSapien]

Facebook is reportedly planning for Trump to meddle with election results

When the election interference comes from inside the White House.

www.engadget.com

Facebook is reportedly planning for Trump to meddle with election results​

When the election interference comes from inside the White House.​

Facebook, which has long resisted putting checks on political speech, is now grappling with an uncomfortable new scenario: what should it do if the president is the one trying to interfere with election results.

The New York Times reports that the social network is now gaming out various scenarios as part of its pre-election work to prevent interference on its platform. It’s not clear exactly just what steps Facebook may take, but the fact that the company is walking through various scenarios suggests it intends to act should Trump try to meddle with the results.

“Facebook employees are laying out contingency plans and walking through postelection scenarios that include attempts by Mr. Trump or his campaign to use the platform to delegitimize the results,” The New York Times reports. The company is also gaming out what it would do if Trump uses Facebook to “wrongly claim on the site that he won another four-year term,” or if he “tries to invalidate the results by declaring that the Postal Service lost mail-in ballots or that other groups meddled with the vote.”

Trump has made repeated false claims about mail-in ballots and election fraud in recent months. Experts have warned the comments could trigger a “nightmare scenario” on election day as it’s likely that results won’t be official for at least several days after polls close.

Facebook executives have previously hinted that they may be preparing for such scenarios. The company said last week that it was “actively speaking with election officials about the potential of misinformation around election results as an emerging threat.” The post didn’t mention the president, but noted that “a prolonged ballot process has the potential to be exploited in order to sow distrust in the election outcome.” Facebook also said it would rely on its voting information center to share authoritative information about election results.

 

[silentwitness]

Another example of Facebook being a publisher where they will claim what iare true and what are false claims of electoral fraud and are wiling to use their product to silence political voices.

I hope if President Trump wins and gets (despite any attempt at Facebook and Twitter etc. to take it from him) that afterwards he is able to create long overdue legislation with regards to legislating these strongly partisan Left leaning social media sites to be politically neutral or to forego rights that assume they will be political neutral…

There is a nightmare scenario where President Trump wins the election (in reality) and the Democrats go into their crazy parallel universe of truth mode (aka Trump is a Russian agent) at all levels of government and the social media companies work in unison (as they have in the past) to ban Republican voices.

Such a scenario is really pushing the possibility of civil war and the Left have to really look at themselves in how they conduct politics, protests and free speech because their attitudes and actions are pushing things that way.

 

[ThinkingSapien]

Another example of Facebook being a publisher

“Publisher” persuant to the laws on speech liability is the person or entity that made a statement being analyzed. IOW, it answers the question “who is it that said this?” The removal of a statement is not an example of being a publisher any more than a book store deciding to nolonger have a book on their shelf.

If that book contained statements that were found to be defamation the answer to the question of “who is it that said this” would be the author(s) and possibly the editor(s) of the book. Not the printers and distributors.

they will claim what iare true and what are false claims

Not deleting a statement is not a declaration of the truth value of the statement.

There is a nightmare scenario where President Trump wins the election (in reality) and the Democrats go into their crazy parallel universe of truth mode (aka Trump is a Russian agent) at all levels of government and the social media companies work in unison (as they have in the past) to ban Republican voices.

While I don’t think this will happen, it is within First Amendment rights to setup an online community that by design only contains people with certain disposition or has chosen constraints on speech. Especially of the forums do not charge money for participation, since charging money could put the forum under the constraint of commerce laws. Such freedom enables us to have online forums like CAF.