Twitter, Facebook split on Trump’s posts

OAKLAND, Calif. – President Donald Trump posted identical messages on Twitter and Facebook last week.

But while the social platforms have similar policies on voter misinformation and glorifying violence, they dealt with Trump’s posts differently, proof that Silicon Valley is far from a united front when it comes to political decisions.

Twitter placed a warning label on two Trump tweets that called mail-in ballots “fraudulent” and predicted problems with the November elections.

It demoted and placed a stronger warning on a tweet about Minneapolis protests that read, in part, that “when the looting starts the shooting starts.” Facebook left the posts alone. “Facebook doesn’t want to alienate certain communities,” said Dipayan Ghosh, co-director of the digital platforms and democracy project at Harvard’s Kennedy School. “It doesn’t want to tick off a whole swatch of people who really believe the president and appreciate his tweets.”

Twitter has a history of taking stronger stances, Ghosh said, including a ban on political advertisements that the company announced in November.

That’s partly because Facebook, a larger company with a broader audience, caught in the crosshairs of regulators over its size, has more to lose.

And partly because the companies’ CEOs don’t always see eye to eye on their role in society.

“Our position is that we should enable as much expression as possible unless it will cause imminent risk of specific harms or dangers spelled out in clear policies,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post Friday.

Referring to Trump’s comments about the Minneapolis protests, Zuckerberg

said that he had “a visceral negative reaction to this kind of divisive and inflammatory rhetoric.”

Facebook decided, he said, to keep the president’s comment because “we read it as a warning about state action, and we think people need to know if the government is planning to deploy force.”

Zuckerberg has often said Facebook does not seek to be “the arbiter of truth.”

Meanwhile, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted that Twitter will “continue to point out incorrect or disputed information about elections globally.” But he added: “This does not make us an ‘arbiter of truth.’ ”