Former Facebook security chief says Twitter’s labeling of Trump’s tweets is a ‘smart move’

Former Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos praised Twitter on Wednesday for how the company has handled President Donald Trump’s controversial tweets, calling the social network’s approach a “smart move.”

“Allowing something to exist without deleting them and then taking away the amplification is actually the smart move,” Stamos said at the Collision from Home conference.

Stamos remarks comes as Facebook faces criticism for its mostly hands-off approach to posts from politicians, including Trump. While Facebook has left most of Trump’s posts untouched, its rival Twitter started labeling the president’s tweets. 

Twitter veiled two of Trump’s tweets for violating its rules against “glorifying violence” and for including a “threat of harm against an identifiable group.” The notice on Trump’s tweets state that the president violated the site’s rules, but the tweet was left up because of public interest. Users can still view the tweet by clicking on the notice, but the company also reduced its spread by taking away the ability to like, reply or share the post. You can still retweet Trump’s tweet with a comment.

Twitter has also added another label to Trump’s tweets that included false claims about mail-in ballots. Last week, the company labeled a misleading video Trump shared that included a fake CNN ticker as “manipulated,” before removing the video like Facebook because of a copyright complaint.

“Facebook’s going to have to follow…Twitter a little bit more here,” said Stamos, director of Stanford University’s Internet Observatory. “Twitter I think could do more too but in both cases I think they’re just gonna have to be honest and transparent about this because the issue that’s happening is they’re not saying how they’re making these decisions.”

Pointing to the viral Plandemic video that included various conspiracy theories about the coronavirus plandemic, Stamos pointed out that pulling down content can fuel its spread. Facebook and Google-owned YouTube removed the videos because it suggested that wearing a mask can make you sick, which the companies considered harmful coronavirus misinformation. Twitter, which said the video didn’t violate its rules, blocked hashtags for the video and marked links to the content as unsafe in an attempt to limit its spread. Despite all those efforts, copies of the video kept popping up on the platforms. 

“People who wanted to find it still found it, but when they found it they found it in the context of this is the forbidden fruit I was not allowed to have,” Stamos said. “That in a lot of ways made it much more powerful.”

Reducing the spread of disinformation and labeling it, he said, is a “good balance” and the “best way to fight disinformation.”

Facebook does partner with third-party fact checkers and places a warning notice over posts that contain misinformation. But it doesn’t send posts from politicians to fact checkers. The company said that users should be able to see what politicians say and that political speech is already heavily scrutinized.

Despite concerns that Trump’s posts could incite violence against protesters, Facebook determined that the president’s controversial remarks that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” didn’t violate its rules. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in late May that Trump’s post included a reference to the National Guard so the company read it as a warning about state action, which is allowed under its policy about the incitement of violence. 

“Unlike Twitter, we do not have a policy of putting a warning in front of posts that may incite violence because we believe that if a post incites violence, it should be removed regardless of whether it is newsworthy, even if it comes from a politician,” he said.

After Facebook employees staged a rare protest against its employer, Zuckerberg said that the social network was reviewing its policies including about the use of state force.

It’s considering whether to label posts from politicians with misinformation, but Zuckerberg also raised concerns that doing so includes a risk of leading Facebook “to editorialize on content” it doesn’t like. 

Meanwhile, Trump has accused social networks of censoring conservative speech. In late May, Trump signed an executive order that would curtail the legal protections internet platforms get under a federal law from content posted by its users. The Center for Democracy and Technology filed a lawsuit against the order, alleging that it violated the First Amendment and was retaliatory against Twitter.