Anderson Cooper grilled a spokesperson from Facebook, Monika Bickert, for over 8 minutes about why they feel just grand about leaving doctored videos of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi up on their platforms. (Sidenote - I always wonder how and why Zuckerburg manages to find women to be the public face of this shite, thowing them up as shields to bear the brunt of the anger and fire of their most abhorrent policies, but that's probably a post for another day.) Bickert dodged and weaved, painfully declaring that they were justified in their virtual inaction. Pun intended.
These fake videos, confirmed to be fake by many independent organizations, have been doctored to make Speaker Pelosi appear drunk, stuttering, and incapable of speaking well. They've been shared, of course, by the Bully-In-Chief, and viewed millions of times on Facebook. YouTube simply removed the video. Twitter has done nothing. Facebook "demoted" the video, in that it removed it from "trending" and such, but doesn't stop people from sharing it. If people want to find it, it's easy to do.
Here's Bikert's painful, lame attempt to justify this complicity with and contribution to Trump's re-election campaign:
COOPER: But you keep it up. Why keep it up, though?
BICKERT: We do, yeah. We think it's important for people to make their own informed choice about what to believe. Our job is to make sure that we are getting them accurate information....if there were misinformation tied to, let's say, an ongoing riot, or the threat of some physical violence somewhere in the world, we would work with safety organizations on the ground to confirm falsity and the link to violence, and then we actually would remove that misinformation.
COOPER: So, misinformation that doesn't provoke violence, but misinformation that portrays the third-most powerful politician as a drunk or somehow impaired, that's fine?
BICKERT: No, what's important to us is that people have the accurate information in order to make the informed choice.
COOPER: But it's not accurate information.
Hold up. Riots?
Raise your hand if you've been reading my posts long enough to the BIG problem with that, here. I should see EVERY HAND in the air. For those newcomers, that's a quality textbook racist microagression, right there. And a nice way to bring up the fact that events likely to lead to unrest in the Black communities will get removed from Facebook, while outright LIES by white people are permitted to remain unmolested on its platform. If that isn't a summary of Facebook's priorities in a nutshell, I don't know what is.
Furthermore, it's even more evidence that Facebook doesn't consider white supremacy something that leads to VIOLENCE. They have learned NOTHING.
She attempted to equivocate by saying that the conversation that is happening is primarily about the fact that the video was doctored, and that is the conversation that should be happening. Well, YEAH, but doesn't Facebook have a responsibility to make sure that once they know the video is fake, the ONLY thing that gets shared is the conversation about how the manbaby-president shared a doctored video of his rival, and not the actual video itself?
Then Cooper slammed her about pretending to NOT be in the news business.
BICKERT: Look, I reject the notion that we're not doing a lot to counter misinformation...
COOPER: No, I'm not saying you're not doing a lot, I'm just saying if you are in this particular case, spreading and allowing the spread of a clearly doctored, false video, again, you're in the news business, again, there's a responsibility that comes with that, and this isn't even a question.
BICKERT: We aren't in the news business. We're in the social media business.
COOPER: Well, you ARE in the news business. The reason you're sharing news is because you make money from it. It keeps people watching you and involved with your site, which I get, and that's fair. But if you're in the news business, which you are, you gotta do it right, and this is false information you are spreading.
Then, THEN, (and I watch these so you don't have to, but if you want to see just how complicit and disgustingly slavish to Trump Facebook is you need to watch until the end,) Anderson Cooper drops the question that ENDS this interview.
Would Facebook allow a similarly doctored video of Trump to stay on its site? The answer, of course, should have been an immediate and unequivocal "Yes." Right?
Guess what her answer was? I'll save you the trouble. She wouldn't answer. Which is, in and of itself, Facebook's answer.
