PALO ALTO: Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg told an all-staff meeting on Thursday that former Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon had not violated enough of the company’s policies to justify his suspension when he urged beheading two senior U.S. officials, according to a recording heard by Reuters.
“We have specific rules around how many times you need to violate certain policies before we will deactivate your account completely,” Zuckerberg said. “While the offenses here, I think, came close to crossing that line, they clearly did not cross the line.”
Bannon suggested in a video posted on Nov. 5 that FBI Director Christopher Wray and government infectious diseases expert Anthony Fauci should be beheaded, saying they had been disloyal to U.S. President Donald Trump, who last week lost his re-election bid.
“I’d put the heads on pikes. Right. I’d put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats. You either get with the program or you are gone,” Bannon said in the video.
Facebook removed the video but left up Bannon’s page, which has about 175,000 followers. Twitter banned Bannon last week over the same content.
Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said the company would take further action against Bannon’s page “if there are additional violations.”
Last Friday, Facebook took down a network of other Bannon-linked pages that were pushing false claims about the presidential election, after they were flagged to the world’s biggest social media company by activist group Avaaz.
Avaaz said seven of the largest pages had amassed nearly 2.5 million followers. Stone said Facebook had removed “several clusters of activity for using inauthentic behavior tactics to artificially boost how many people saw their content.”
Bannon could not immediately be reached for comment.
Zuckerberg spoke on the issue at a weekly forum with Facebook employees where he is sometimes asked to defend content and policy decisions. A staff member had asked why Bannon had not been banned.
Arrested in August, Bannon has pleaded not guilty to charges of defrauding hundreds of thousands of donors to the $25 million (£19 million) “We Build the Wall” campaign. Bannon has dismissed the charges as politically motivated.
As Trump’s chief White House strategist, Bannon helped articulate Trump’s “America First” policy. Trump fired him in August 2017, ending Bannon’s turbulent tenure.
Disclaimer: This post has been auto-published from an agency feed without any modifications to the text and has not been reviewed by an editor
Read all the Latest News, Breaking News and Coronavirus News here
Comments
0 comment