SAN FRANCISCO — Earlier this week, as Twitter executives waded into a confrontation with President Trump, Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook, took a very different tack: He kept his head down.
On Tuesday, Twitter added a fact-check link to one of Mr. Trump’s tweets criticizing mail-in voting. The company said the president violated rules regarding voter suppression. Mr. Trump posted the same words on Facebook, which has similar rules around voter suppression. But Facebook didn’t do anything to it.
Twitter’s face-off escalated Friday morning, when the company attached an addendum to one of Mr. Trump’s tweets. The company said the tweet had the potential to incite violence amid protests in Minneapolis. Facebook didn’t do anything when the same post was added to its service.
Jack Dorsey, chief executive of Twitter, took to his site not long after to say Twitter would not back down, presenting a stark contrast to Mr. Zuckerberg, who, in an interview a day earlier with Fox News, said Facebook wasn’t going to judge Mr. Trump’s posts.
“We’ve been pretty clear on our policy that we think that it wouldn’t be right for us to do fact checks for politicians,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. “I think in general, private companies probably shouldn’t be — or especially these platform companies — shouldn’t be in the position of doing that.”
Mr. Zuckerberg’s reminder that Facebook would not interfere with posts from Mr. Trump — even if they violate rules that would apply to other people — was in part the product of his longtime belief that his company should avoid getting into the political fray and let its three billion users have their say.
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President Trump’s tweet on voting practices received a fact check from Twitter.ImageThe same post by President Trump on Facebook received no alterations despite Facebook having very similar rules around voter suppression.Credit…His assurance that his company would not be an “arbiter of truth” in political discussion was also indicative of an aggressive effort over the last year or so to court Republicans in Washington and conservative voices in the media. The goal: to keep regulators off his giant internet company’s back.
By staying on the sidelines as Twitter does battle with Mr. Trump and his allies, Mr. Zuckerberg could gain unlikely Republican friends to stave off regulatory intervention into his business, which lawmakers around the world have threatened for more than a year.
Many people in the tech industry believe regulators — not economic collapse brought on by the coronavirus pandemic or any other problem — are the one existential risk to Mr. Zuckerberg’s business.
“Zuckerberg’s instincts have been right,” said Brendan Carr, a Republican commissioner at the Federal Communications Commission. “Zuckerberg said, ‘We trust people to make up their minds.’”
But Mr. Zuckerberg’s hands-off approach to Mr. Trump’s increasingly incendiary behavior on social media runs the risk of alienating some users who think the
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By: Mike Isaac and Cecilia Kang
Title: While Twitter Confronts Trump, Zuckerberg Keeps Facebook Out of It
Sourced From: www.nytimes.com/2020/05/29/technology/twitter-facebook-zuckerberg-trump.html
Published Date: Fri, 29 May 2020 21:44:51 +0000
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