Facebook VP Nick Clegg found Trump's 'looting and shooting' remark abhorrent but defends keeping it up on site
Sir Nick Clegg, the former deputy prime minister of the UK who now works for Facebook, slammed Donald Trump's "when the looting starts, the shooting starts" comment and shared that Facebook has taken down ads from the president's election campaign. Asked what he thought of Trump's recent comments on the George Floyd protesters on BBC Radio 4's Today program, Clegg, the social media giant's vice president of Global Affairs, said he found it "abhorrent."
Following widespread riots in the aftermath of George Floyd's Memorial Day death in the custody of four Minneapolis police officers, Trump had criticized the city's Democratic mayor, called the protesters "thugs," and promised to send in the National Guard to "get the job done right." He then tweeted, "Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!"
The post was flagged by Twitter for "glorifying violence" but remained visible on Facebook. Clegg defended their decision to keep it up by arguing they had to uphold the freedom of expression. "I think defending free expression, when it is controversial to do so, is important because in the end, the way to hold politicians to account, if you don’t like Donald Trump - and boy there are lots of people who don’t - is to attack what he says and eventually of course campaign and vote against him," he said. "We think our tools allow people to do that in an open and democratic way."
Clegg then seemingly defended Trump's threat and said it was just the president's way of "saying that he felt the governor of Minnesota had not taken aggressive enough action at the time rioting was breaking out.."
"In other words [Trump] was threatening state action," he said. "And like all social media companies, we allow governments to say that they are going to deploy force if they wish to."
Mark Zuckerberg has previously explained his reasoning behind keeping the controversial post up by suggesting that, while he had a "visceral negative reaction" to the president's "divisive and inflammatory rhetoric," it was also his responsibility to enable free expression. "I'm responsible for reacting not just in my personal capacity but as the leader of an institution committed to free expression," he had written in a lengthy Facebook post. "I know many people are upset that we've left the President's posts up, but our position is that we should enable as much expression as possible unless it will cause imminent risk of specific harms or dangers spelled out in clear policies."
Clegg expanded that argument further and said keeping the post up allowed its users to hold politicians accountable for the things they said and that it was common for such figures to make "caricatured claims about their own virtues and caricatured claims about the vices of their opponents."
"The idea that a private company, that in a sense has got no legitimacy to act as an arbiter of political truth as political opponents slug it out, should intervene and say, 'You can’t say this and you can’t say that,'" he argued. "I think people would feel quite rightly that Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook don’t have the legitimacy to do that."
He also brushed away suggestions that Facebook had not done enough to keep Trump in check. "We, by the way, have removed a number of ads from Donald Trump over the last several months," he shared.