Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg: Private companies should not censor politicians
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t believe Twitter should take away President Donald Trump’s digital megaphone.
“My belief is that in a democracy I don’t think that we want private companies censoring politicians in the news,” Zuckerberg said in an interview with Fox News’ Dana Perino, set to air Friday.
Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris recently called on Twitter to suspend Trump from the service. Twitter responded to Harris on Tuesday, saying it would not suspend the president.
It’s a position to which Zuckerberg appears sympathetic.
“I generally believe that as a principle, people should decide what is credible, what they want to believe and who they want to vote for, and I don’t think that that should be something that we want tech companies, or any kind of other company [to] do,” he said during the interview.
Zuckerberg also defended Facebook’s policy regarding political advertisements. Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren has taken aim at the social media giant over its role in spreading disinformation against her and other candidates. Her campaign ran an ad on Facebook that contained a deliberate lie to draw further attention to the issue.
That move came after a recording leaked of Zuckerberg telling employees that a Warren presidency would “suck” for the company.
“Look, I just think that in a democracy, it’s important for people to see for themselves what politicians are saying,” Zuckerberg told Perino. “And political speech is one of the most scrutinized speech that is out there, so that’s already happening. And our position on this is not an outlier.”
