How Donald Trump changed Facebook - The Verge

Land of the Giants looks at how Facebook grappled with its political power during Donald Trump’s presidency and in the wake of the 2016 and 2020 elections.

At one point in time, Facebook’s relationship with politicians was relatively uncontroversial.

But after the 2016 US elections, everything changed.

Early in the campaign, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump tested the limits of Facebook’s rules against hateful speech at the same time that the company became a vehicle of political exploitation by foreign actors.

Facebook’s first test: dealing with Trump’s 2015 Facebook post calling for a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslims entering the US. While some inside the company saw a strong argument that Trump’s comments violated Facebook’s rules against religious hate speech, the company decided to keep the post up. Until then, most Facebook employees had never before grappled with the possibility that their platform could be used to stoke division by a political candidate for the highest position of office.

“What do you do when the leading candidate for president posts an attack…on [one of the] the biggest religion[s] in the world?” former Facebook employee and Democratic lobbyist Crystal Patterson told us.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/10/23300246/trump-facebook-election-land-of-the-giants

---