UK Edition
US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has accused Facebook of being a “willing enabler” of Russian interference in US politics after the social network refused to delete an altered video of her.
Many edited videos of Ms Pelosi have been circulated on Facebook in recent weeks, with the footage slowed down or modified to make the House Speaker appear to slur her speech.
Facebook has refused to delete the videos, and instead reduced the frequency that the footage appears in its users’ feeds. It has also added information that is displayed alongside the edited videos, which inform users that the footage has been modified.
“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,” Ms Pelosi said on Wednesday.
“They’re lying to the public,” Ms Pelosi said. “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."
Facebook said in 2017 that an estimated 10m people viewed content created by a Russian agency that was designed to interfere with the US presidential election.
Donald Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani published a link to the edited video on Twitter last week, but later deleted the post.
Ms Pelosi has frequently clashed with Mr Trump. Last week, the US president reportedly stormed out of a meeting with Democrats after a comment by Ms Pelosi in which she accused the president of overseeing a “cover-up.”
Hillary Clinton said in a speech on Wednesday that the video of Ms Pelosi is “sexist trash.”
“Facebook refused to take down a fake video of Nancy Pelosi,” she said. “It wasn’t even a close call. The video is sexist trash. And YouTube took it down but Facebook kept it up.”
YouTube has deleted copies of the video, saying that it violated its policies. A Facebook spokesman said that “we don’t have a policy that stipulates that the information you post on Facebook must be true.”