Ocasio-Cortez to Zuckerberg: Why are you partnering with ‘The Daily Caller who has ties to white supremacists’

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Oct 24, 2019

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was questioned by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez during a hearing at the House Financial Services Committee on Wednesday about Facebook’s fact-checking operations.

“Why Facebook is partnering with ‘the Daily Caller’, a publication well-documented with ties to white supremacists, as an official fact-checker for Facebook,” asked Ocasio-Cortez, without providing or referring to any proof as to why she’s calling ‘The Daily Caller’ a publication “with white supremacist ties” on the House floor.

“We actually don’t appoint the independent fact-checkers,” Mark Zuckerberg responded. “They go through an independent organization called the Independent Fact-Checking Network, that has a rigorous standard for who they allow to serve as a fact-checker.”

“So you would say that white supremacist-tied publications meet a rigorous standard for fact-checking?” Ocasio-Cortez continued her question.

Ocasio-Cortez went on to ask the Facebook CEO also about Facebook’s practices with political ads and how would they screen and fact check the ads.

“Do you see a potential problem here with a complete lack of fact-checking on political advertisements?” Ocasio-Cortez asked.

“I think if you were to run an ad that had a lie, that would be bad. That’s different from it being, in our position, the right thing to do to prevent your constituents or people in an election from seeing that you had lied,” replied Zuckerberg.

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