‘L.A. Times’ Blasts Facebook For ‘Spineless’ Response To Doctored Nancy Pelosi Video
The Los Angeles Times blasted Facebook for their response to a doctored video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi which spread across major social media platforms this week. In an opinion piece published on Friday, Joe Healey was sharply critical of the social media giant, calling the company out for failing to respond appropriately to the false video which achieved viral notoriety as it spread across the site unchecked.
The video in question originates from a speech that Pelosi made earlier in the week. The audio is slowed down to make it appear that the congresswoman is intoxicated to the point of slurring her words.
“You’d think that it would be an easy call for Facebook to remove and block videos that are indisputably altered to fool the public,” Healey writes. “You would be wrong.”
As The Inquisitr detailed previously, while video sharing platform YouTube cracked down on distribution of the video, neither Facebook nor Twitter have so far taken similar action. A spokesperson from Facebook attempted to clarify their position in a prepared statement.
“We remove things from Facebook that violate our Community Standards, and we don’t have a policy that stipulates that the information you post on Facebook must be true,” the statement read. According to reports, the company is however working to deemphasize the videos in terms of how frequently they appear in the news feeds of users and adding fact-checking content to clarify the deceptive nature of the videos.
Facebook’s formal policy on such content echoes that sentiment.
“We want to help people stay informed without stifling productive public discourse,” it reads in part. “There is also a fine line between false news and satire or opinion. For these reasons, we don’t remove false news from Facebook but instead, significantly reduce its distribution by showing it lower in the News Feed.”
How Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter dealt with the doctored video of Pelosi may serve as a warning of what’s to come in 2020. https://t.co/5jP9GobCma
— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) May 25, 2019
So far the video has racked up a staggering number of views on Facebook. In fact, a single Facebook page, the conservative outlet Politics WatchDog, generated more than 2.5 million views of the video from their page alone.
Healey goes on to suggest that part of the reason that Facebook may be so hesitant to tamp down on the Pelosi video could be recent allegations, including from President Donald Trump himself, that Facebook and other platforms are consistently biased against conservative voices and thought. The president, for example, tweeted as recently as Thursday that social media rival Twitter was shutting down and marginalizing conservative content.
