Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has fired back at President Donald Trump after he criticized the social network in a pair of tweets Wednesday morning.
Expressing his thoughts in a post on the platform he built, Zuckerberg said that Trump’s claims that “Facebook was always anti-Trump” are the opposite of what liberals and the media argued following his election.
“Trump says Facebook is against him. Liberals say we helped Trump,” Zuckerberg wrote. “Both sides are upset about ideas and content they don’t like. That’s what running a platform for all ideas looks like.”
Earlier Wednesday, Trump said that in addition to Facebook, “The Networks were always anti-Trump hence,Fake News, @nytimes(apologized) & @WaPo were anti-Trump.”
He concluded the first tweet with, “Collusion?” before adding another that said: “But the people were Pro-Trump! Virtually no President has accomplished what we have accomplished in the first 9 months-and economy roaring.”
Zuckerberg argued that despite the role Facebook may have played in helping spread misinformation, the site served as a space for “billions of interactions discussing the issues” far beyond what the media covered, while providing a platform for candidates to communicate “directly with tens of millions of followers every day.”
He also talked up Facebook’s “get out the vote” effort, which he claimed helped at least two million people register to vote. “[T]hat’s bigger than the get out the vote efforts of the Trump and Clinton campaigns put together. That’s a big deal.”
It appears that Facebook’s recent decision to hand over materials to congressional investigators looking into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election may have prompted Trump’s attack on the social network.
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