According to a report from the New York Times, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was so “appalled” by President Trump’s comments on immigration, he quizzed executives to determine if the President broke Facebook’s rules.
A recent article published by the New York Times titled “Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis,” provides insight into how Facebook has operated through numerous crises over the past few years, how they have targeted their competitors and how Facebook executives have reacted to political issues.
In 2015, Donald Trump called for a shutdown of Muslim immigration following a series of Islamic terrorist attacks across the globe. This apparently upset Zuckerberg who runs an immigration-based nonprofit organization called FWD.US, and the CEO questioned whether Trump’s comments broke Facebook’s terms of service:
Mr. Zuckerberg, who had helped found a nonprofit dedicated to immigration reform, was appalled, said employees who spoke to him or were familiar with the conversation. He asked Ms. Sandberg and other executives if Mr. Trump had violated Facebook’s terms of service.
The question was unusual. Mr. Zuckerberg typically focused on broader technology issues; politics was Ms. Sandberg’s domain. In 2010, Ms. Sandberg, a Democrat, had recruited a friend and fellow Clinton alum, Marne Levine, as Facebook’s chief Washington representative. A year later, after Republicans seized control of the House, Ms. Sandberg installed another friend, a well-connected Republican: Joel Kaplan, who had attended Harvard with Ms. Sandberg and later served in the George W. Bush administration.
The report also alleges that Facebook hired a PR firm which published articles critical of Facebook’s competitors through an associated conservative news website and that the social media website hired a Republican opposition research firm to discredit activist protesters critical of Facebook’s data breaches. It is also noted in the report that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was not happy with President Trump’s comments on immigration.
Read the full report in the New York Times here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan_ or email him at lnolan@breitbart.com.
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