Facebook refuses to remove falsified video depicting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi

In May 2019, a video surfaced on Facebook that purported to demonstrate House Speaker Nancy Pelosi slurring her words. After the video was proven to be a fake, Facebook nonetheless refused to remove it, arguing that it did not violate the site’s community standards.

Key Players

Facebook is a social media network with 2 billion users. It received significant criticism after the 2016 U.S. presidential election, when it was revealed that Russian operatives had used the platform to disseminate divisive and false content in the United States.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. A video of her talking with the press was slowed to make it appear that she was slurring her words, as if she were ill or intoxicated. The video was viewed more than 2.8 million times, and Facebook refused to remove it. 

Further Details

On May 22, 2019, Pelosi and President Donald Trump met to discuss initiatives to address the country’s crumbling infrastructure. However, the meeting ended abruptly and both politicians left unsatisfied. Pelosi spoke with the press after the meeting, and the video of her remarks was slowed down by 25% and released on social media, according to Politico. Pelosi appeared to be slurring her words, and the video was widely shared and cited as evidence of her physical and mental unfitness to hold her position. According to The New Yorker, there were as many as 17 versions of the doctored video circulating, and the most popular one was viewed more than 2 million times. 

Many commentators called on Facebook to remove the video, arguing that it was misleading and false. Facebook representatives, however, refused to do so, explaining on CNN that the video did not violate any of the company’s community guidelines. Monika Bickert, a Facebook spokesperson, explained that the social media company does not remove false content but rather tries to ensure that its users “make an informed choice” when confronted with questionable material on the platform. In practice, explained Bickert, this meant that once Facebook heard from a third-party fact-checker that the video was false, it made the video appear lower in users’ news feeds and warned them that the content was inaccurate.

Facebook’s community guidelines explain that the platform works to reduce the spread of false information by “disrupting economic incentives for people, pages, and domains that propagate misinformation … [r]educing the distribution of content rated as false by independent third-party fact-checkers” and “[e]mpowering people to decide for themselves what to read, trust, and share by informing them with more context and promoting news literacy.” Despite these steps, CNET reports, one version of the video was shared more than 48,000 times and viewed more than 2.8 million times. 

Outcome 

Twitter offers no comment on refusal to pull Pelosi video

While Facebook justified its decision publicly through Bickert, Twitter refused both to remove the video and to explain why it kept it on the platform, according to The New Yorker. According to The Washington Post, the origin of the video remains unclear.