Twitter users by the thousand urged that people delete their Facebook accounts after the viral spread of a doctored video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made the congresswoman appear to be drunkenly slurring her words, Newsweek reports. The campaign’s hashtag, #DeleteFacebook, was the top-trending topic on Saturday.
Facebook and other social media platforms, Twitter itself included, struggled to respond to public frustrations this week as the video continued to spread. The doctored footage picked up momentum thanks major conservative figures and groups that shared it, per The Inquisitr .
“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,” said a Facebook spokesperson in a prepared statement. The company did indicate, however, that they were deprioritizing the videos in terms of how frequently they appear in Facebook news feeds and were adding fact-checking content to clarify that the videos had been altered.
So far, YouTube has been the only major platform to remove the video outright, and Twitter has declined to comment.
Early in the video’s spread, it was posted to Facebook on the right-leaning Politics WatchDog page, where it generated more than 2.5 million views, along with more than 46,000 shares and over 28,000 comments. In subsequent posts, the Politics WatchDog page suggested that Pelosi should be removed from office.
Haven’t seen this before. Here’s what Facebook now shows you if you try to share the Pelosi video. pic.twitter.com/Hh1QRswTsP
— Donie O’Sullivan (@donie) May 25, 2019
The first traditional media outlet to call out the deceptive video was The Washington Post , which led to Politics WatchDog decrying their coverage as “fake news,” using the dismissive phrase made popular on the right by President Donald Trump.
“Independent fact checkers that Facebook users are pro-liberal and funded by the left. We’re not a conservative news page but since the fake news Washington Post tagged us as such it made it easy for this independent fact checker to come after us,” the group wrote in response to the coverage.
Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, shared the video from his own Twitter account, though Giuliani has since deleted his post.
While the video has spread through a variety of platforms on social and traditional media, Facebook has been largely considered to be the driving force behind its spread, due to the video’s origins on the site and the speed with which it spread on the platform.
“We want to help people stay informed without stifling productive public discourse. 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,” reads Facebook’s formal policy on such content.
