WASHINGTON — Twenty-four hours after the chaos at the U.S. Capitol, President Trump has been silent on social media. That’s because he’s been banned.
Facebook, Instagram and Twitter have barred the president from posting.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said the president’s account will be locked for at least two weeks, but could remain locked indefinitely.
“I think this is a day that will go down in internet history as you know one of the most insane. You know, I think it’s Zuckerberg finally realizing that it wasn’t necessarily the case that Trump was exercising free speech, but he was using his Facebook to do a massive disinformation campaign. It’s a really terrible lesson to learn when many people in this field have been calling for Facebook to do more about the election fraud disinformation over the last few months,” said Dr. Joan Donovan, research director for Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Donovan said when you think about how people came to arrive at this mass delusion about voter fraud, you don’t just look at the president. You also have to look at the people around him who were creating media about mass voter fraud.
“So there is a whole network of accounts across YouTube, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook that day in and day out, sometimes for multiple hours a day, would be pushing this disinformation campaign so it does extend broader to the president, but there were so many points along the way where action should have been taken,” she said.
Donovan also said social media played a big role in the chaos at the Capitol.
“I think social media was fairly consequential in the sense in what we have are a bunch of people planning to arrive at the same place at the same time, but what’s tricky about it was the reason they were going there was essentially a massive disinformation campaign made them believe that the election was being stolen. Not only by the democrats but eventually the entire conspiracy theory started to involve numerous republicans, as well.”
Donovan said as we go forward, there needs to be a lot more rules about the use of social media by sitting politicians. If not, this will continue time and time again.
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