File – Facebook claims a Russian group posted more than 80,000 times on its network during and after the 2016 election. (REUTERS Photo/Dado Ruvic)
OAN Newsroom
UPDATED 7:24 AM PT – Tuesday, January 12, 2020
Despite widespread backlash, Facebook has refused to reinstate President Trump’s account on its platform. The social media giant said it has no intention of unblocking the President.
In an interview on Monday, Facebook Operations Officer Sheryl Sandberg defended the company’s decision to suspend the President’s account.
“At least through the transition, we’ve been very clear,” she stated. “There’s obviously so much happening and this is such a big step. We will definitely let people know and be very transparent about any changes to that.”
President Trump, his attorney and the American Civil Liberties Union have all called the ban inappropriate, but Sandberg didn’t stop with her criticism of the President. Instead, she compared the Democrat-run narrative of so-called Russian collusion to the grassroots efforts of American voters to unify and hold election officials accountable.
“I mean when you think about what’s happened here in the 2016 election, there were a lot of things we missed,” said the Facebook official. “We didn’t know what foreign interference was. The Russian interference took us by surprise and that’s on us.”
One of the instances of potential interference, Facebook unilaterally determined, was the phrase ‘Stop the Steal.’ They issued a site wide ban on any iteration of the phrase.
Meanwhile, former GOP congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul said Facebook has blocked him from managing his own page on the platform. In a tweet on Monday, the libertarian said Facebook provided no explanation for the move other than saying he repeatedly violated community standards.
Facebook now considers advocating for liberty to be sedition. Where will it end? https://t.co/Ws6pBq923N
— Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) January 11, 2021
According to Paul, he had never been previously notified of violating community standards and Facebook did not specify what posts broke the rules. The move came after Paul posted a link to his weekly Texas Straight Talk column in which he criticized Big Tech’s censorship of President Trump.
In the wake of attempts to silence elected officials, however, not everyone is just accepting this new standard of social media imposed censorship. A small internet provider in Idaho blocked Facebook and Twitter over political censorship on those platforms.
The company said scores of its customers were censored by Twitter and Facebook, which requires an appropriate response. The internet provider announced its ban of both platforms will go into effect on Wednesday.
