Facebook Prioritized Russian Trolls Before 2016 US Elections, Criminal Neglect Led To Trump Victory

With mounting evidence that the social media platform has done enormous damage to the American people when it allowed Russian elements to influence the 2016 election, Facebook is still adamant that it wasn’t to blame for the results. However, it would seem that even before Russian trolls used the platform to spread fake news, there were already signs that it was being used as a political weapon.

In a recent report by The Daily Beast, the publication revealed that Facebook ignored the presence of Russian trolls on the platform and even catered to their needs. This neglect led to Ukrainian activists getting banned from Facebook for no apparent reason.

“I’ve been blocked [from Facebook] because of a post about a rainbow. I put a picture of my city [with] a picture of [the] rainbow. The picture said, ‘Everything will be okay,’” Yaroslav Matiushyn said to the publication. “I was blocked for a month. One was a text post. It wasn’t erotic text—no porno, nothing erotic. They complained there is some nudity in it.”

This problem became so bad that even the Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko asked Facebook to address the issue. The social media platform refused to do so.

While Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg provided a token acknowledgment of his company’s influence on the US elections – which he only did when practically every side was against him – the tech figure is still trying to avoid responsibility. According to him, Facebook did more good than harm during the US elections, The New York Times reports.

It would be difficult to take Zuckerberg or any of Facebook’s executives at their word ever again, especially given how the platform ignored the pleas of Ukrainians in order to appease Russian trolls. The social network might point to the recent German elections to prove that it effectively hindered the spread of misinformation, but no solid data has been provided.