By Drew Harwell | Washington Post
WASHINGTON – House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, said Wednesday that Facebook’s refusal to take down an altered video of her shows that the company’s leaders were active contributors to online disinforrmation and “willing enablers” of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Pelosi’s comments to KQED News, her first public response to the video since it began spreading online last week, revealed a dramatic escalation of tensions between the Democratic leader and the world’s most popular social network.
“We have said all along, poor Facebook, they were unwittingly exploited by the Russians. I think wittingly, because right now they are putting up something that they know is false. I think it’s wrong,” she said, according to KQED. “I can take it. . . . But (Facebook is) lying to the public.”
Pelosi added, “I think they have proven – by not taking down something they know is false – that they were willing enablers of the Russian interference in our election.”
Facebook, which did not immediately respond to requests for comment, has acknowledged that the video is intentionally misleading but declined to remove it, saying in a statement Friday to The Washington Post, “We don’t have a policy that stipulates that the information you post on Facebook must be true.”
Pelosi was not made available for comment after her remarks to KQED.
Facebook said that it has heavily reduced the video’s appearances in people’s news feeds, and that the video now plays alongside a small informational box linking to fact-checks indicating that the video is false. When someone attempts to share the video, a pop-up box tells the user there is “additional reporting” on the video, but it does not say outright that it’s false.
One Facebook version of the video now has 30,000 comments, 38,000 shares and more than 2.8 million views.
