Biden Campaign Asks for Details on Facebook’s Plans to Clean Up

(Bloomberg) -- Joe Biden’s campaign asked Facebook Inc on Tuesday to offer assurances that it is treating seriously what it called President Donald Trump’s “hateful content” and “disinformation.”

Campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon asked Facebook in a letter to move quickly to implement promised precautions for the general election after the company renewed its commitment to cleaning up its platform amid a advertiser’s boycott.

Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg said Friday the company would take new steps to crack down on hate speech on his social media platform and launch “extra precautions to help everyone stay safe, stay informed, and ultimately use their voice where it matters most -- voting.”

O’Malley Dillon asked in a letter to Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs and communications, how Facebook would handle content that could suppress voters, whether its algorithm will continue to amplify “hateful content,” and how it will determine whether a post that violates Facebook’s community standards should be left up and labeled “newsworthy.”

The letter from O’Malley Dillon to Clegg, a former British deputy prime minister, was obtained by Bloomberg News.

O’Malley Dillon also asked the company to guarantee that its Voter Information Center is “at all times accurate.”

Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone said the company appreciates the concerns raised by the Biden campaign and looks “forward to sharing more details about our Voting Information Center, where more Americans will be alerted to accurate, authoritative information about voting than ever before.”

O’Malley Dillon also voiced concerns about a Washington Post report that detailed Facebook’s history of revising its policies to accommodate Trump’s rhetoric and false claims that date back to 2015. The Post reported that Facebook urged Trump to edit or delete a post last month about sending the military to Minneapolis to respond to protests following the killing of George Floyd by police.

“We are troubled by The Post’s confirmation that after President Trump’s tweets about the George Floyd protests, Facebook ‘chose to haggle’ with the White House, requesting edits and deletions, rather than taking a clear and transparent stand based on established policies,” she wrote in the letter, which was first reported by the Post.

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