Mark Zuckerberg reacts after facing backlash for failing to flag divisive and violent posts by Donald Trump

 

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg, co-founder and CEO of Facebook has reacted for the first time after facing backlash for his refusal to subject Donald Trump to the same policies he uses to regulate every other user of his platform.

Donald Trump made certain divisive statements that promoted violence following series of protests in reaction to the gruesome murder of George Floyd by cops in Minneapolis. In one of the posts, Trump stated that, when the protestors start looting, he’ll instruct the national guards to start shooting them, a statement which clearly violate the community’s policies.

Many consider this act a discrimination against other users who were flagged for relatively minor offence. As the criticisms went high, the Facebook CEO was forced to come up with an explanation to his seemingly bias decision.

“I know many people are upset that we left the president’s posts up but our position is that, we should enable as much expression as possible unless it will cause imminent risk of specific harms or dangers spelled out in clear policies” he explained.

He further stated that, although the posts had a troubling historical references, Facebook decided to leave it up because of the national guard references made by the president which he thought was important for people to know if the government was planning to deploy forces.

Unlike Facebook, Twitter has since been treating President Trump like they do to any other user by flagging some of his posts leading to the president’s attacks on the platform.