Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Thursday blasted Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s comments about his platform’s decision not to fact check lawmakers, calling the remarks a “disgrace.”
“As far as the platforms are concerned, they want two things from the federal government: no regulation and no taxes. And so they cater to the Trump administration all the time. I think that Mark Zuckerberg’s statement was a disgrace,” Pelosi said Thursday on MSNBC.
Zuckerberg had told Fox News on Wednesday that he believes private companies “shouldn’t be the arbiter of truth” when asked about Twitter’s decision this week to fact check and place warnings on two of Trump’s tweets.
Pelosi, however, did not praise Twitter for placing warnings on the president’s tweets about mail-in voting in California. She suggested it did not go far enough to address the root of the problem of misinformation.
“They’re not taking off any accusations the president’s making about Joe Scarborough. They know that’s not true. So they do a token thing and think it’s OK,” Pelosi said, referring to Trump’s recent tweets touting an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory about the death of an aide to the former congressman and current MSNBC host.
“They only have a business model to make money, not to convey facts. That’s what they’re about,” she added.
Trump is expected to sign an executive order Thursday that orders a review of a longstanding law protecting Silicon Valley firms from lawsuits.
Pelosi asserted in the MSNBC interview that Trump’s feud with social media platforms is a distraction from the administration’s “failure” in responding to the coronavirus pandemic.
“I think it’s just typical President Trump. A distraction,” she said on MSNBC, adding that more than 100,000 people in the U.S. have died from the coronavirus.
“This administration has been a failure in terms of what we’re doing on … testing, tracing, treating and isolating people. The president has been a terrible example of not wearing a mask, making — belittling those who do. So anything he does is a distraction from the problem at hand,” she added.
Trump has issued a number of tweets regarding the conspiracy theory about the death of Lori Klausutis, an aide who worked in then-Rep. Scarborough’s (R) Florida office.
Klausutis, who had an undiagnosed heart condition, fell and hit her head at work in 2001. She was found dead the next morning.
Scarborough was in Washington at the time, and the medical examiner ruled her death an accident.
Timothy Klausutis, Lori’s husband, recently penned a letter to ask Twitter to take down the president’s tweets.
Twitter has not placed warnings on any of Trump’s tweets regarding the conspiracy theory, but on Tuesday the platform for the first time did place the fact-check warnings on two of Trump’s tweets in which the president made unsubstantiated claims that California’s mail-in voting was full of fraud.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey defended his platform’s decision to do so after Zuckerberg’s comments on Fox News.
“This does not make us an ‘arbiter of truth.’ Our intention is to connect the dots of conflicting statements and show the information in dispute so people can judge for themselves. More transparency from us is critical so folks can clearly see the why behind our actions,” Dorsey tweeted late Wednesday.