Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the calculating, shrewd, all-knowing Speaker of the House, came to a revelation yesterday.
A revelation so shocking and full of truth that it has shaken America to its very core: that Facebook were "willing enablers" of Russian meddling in US elections.
And, as hard as it may be to believe, it seems as if Speaker Pelosi has ironclad evidence to back up this assertion. You see, Facebook were clearly enablers of Russian meddling because they refuse to take down a doctored video of Ms. Pelosi in which her speech is slowed down to sound unnatural and slurred…and that’s about it.
In an interview with KQED News on Wednesday, Pelosi argued:
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… I can take it ... But [Facebook is] lying to the public.
Pelosi then went on to say:
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.
Flawless logic.
The aforementioned video of Pelosi, posted about a week ago by the Facebook page "Politics Watchdog," had its pitch modified and has been slowed down to around 75 percent of its original speed, according to experts interviewed by the Washington Post.
At the time of this publishing, the video has racked up over 2.8 million views.
Facebook refuses to take the video down, and has defended their position in doing so:
There’s a tension here: we work hard to find the right balance between encouraging free expression and promoting a safe and authentic community, and we believe that reducing the distribution of inauthentic content strikes that balance. But just because something is allowed to be on Facebook doesn’t mean it should get distribution. In other words, we allow people to post it as a form of expression, but we’re not going to show it at the top of News Feed.
Beyond Facebook not putting the video in people’s news feeds as factual news, Pelosi seems to have ignored the fact that clicking on the video also brings up five separate articles, each explicitly fact-checking the video as doctored.
Pelosi also seems to have missed the fact that Facebook, in response to growing concerns over fake news, removed over 2.19 billion fake accounts in the first quarter of 2019.