Mark Zuckerberg Responds To Criticism Over Meetings With Conservatives As #DeleteFacebook Trends On Twitter

Dino-Ray Ramos

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Facebook is under scrutiny as #DeleteFacebook has become a trending topic once again in the wake of reports of the social media platform’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg having off-the-record dinners with conservatives.

According to Politico, the dinners began in July and were an attempt to connect with the right after Donald Trump said that Facebook had a bias against conservatives. From Zuckerberg’s actions, many suspect that these dinners are to cater to Trump’s White House. The political news site said a source said that the dinners have been focused on “free expression, unfair treatment of conservatives, the appeals process for real or perceived unfair treatment, fact checking, partnerships and privacy.”

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“There’s some press today discussing dinners I’ve had with conservative politicians, media and thinkers,” said Zuckerberg in a post on Facebook. “To be clear, I have dinners with lots of people across the spectrum on lots of different issues all the time. Meeting new people and hearing from a wide range of viewpoints is part of learning. If you haven’t tried it, I suggest you do!”

When the news of these off-the-record dinners with conservatives came out, Zuckerberg was criticized by many people on the left — mainly because of Facebook’s history with last year’s Cambridge Analytica revelations and the Trump presidential campaign. That said, the #DeleteFacebook hashtag resurfaced and many chimed in on the matter — including actress Yvette Nicole Brown and producer Gale Anne Hurd.

“I stopped actively posting on @Facebook in 2016 after it was revealed that it helped elect the orange fecal smear,” tweeted Brown. “Now #DeleteFacebook seems like the best course of action. Yes, I’m still on IG but I feel it does less to push the trump agenda. Less older white supremacists.”

Hurd tweeted: “Until regulation happens, which is unlikely, I’m suggesting we #DeleteFacebook.”

To add to the woes of Facebook, over the weekend presidential candidate, Elizabeth Warren chimed in on the matter of political ads that contained lies. With that in mind, they decided to run an ad of lies themselves to see if anything had changed — and lo and behold nothing really did.

“We intentionally made a Facebook ad with false claims and submitted it to Facebook’s ad platform to see if it’d be approved,” she posted on Twitter. “It got approved quickly and the ad is now running on Facebook.”

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