‘You Guys Are Watching the Same Stuff, Would You Like to Be Friends?’: Former Senior FBI Official Blames Facebook for Fueling Islamic Extremism

A former senior FBI official on Monday blamed Facebook for aiding and abetting Islamic extremism.

On MSNBC’s Deadline: White House, Frank Figliuzzi, an NBC News national security contributor and former FBI assistant director, warned of “Al Qaeda people coming together because they simply got caught in an algorithm on Facebook where they were watching the same beheading videos and violent sermons and the Facebook algorithm said, ‘Hey, you guys are watching the same stuff, would you like to be friends?’”

Figliuzzi said that by doing this the social media company is “essentially creating terrorist cells on Facebook.”

He said that Facebook has “gotten much better at that. But it’s nowhere near where it needs to be if we’re going to start stomping down on the violence that’s coming from people going down the rabbit hole of misinformation and disinformation and propaganda.”

Figliuzzi’s remarks come as a Facebook whistleblower, Frances Haugen, went public in a 60 Minutes interview that aired on Sunday on CBS in which she accused her former employer, which she quit in May, of contributing to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

Watch above, via MSNBC.

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