Facebook Exec Confronted With Report of Whistleblower Saying the Site Contributed to January 6 Riots

Facebook executive Nick Clegg said the idea that the social media giant is to blame for the January 6th riots is “ludicrous.”

CNN’s Brian Stelter spoke at length with Clegg, vice president of global affairs at Facebook, about serious new Wall Street Journal reporting from Facebook’s internal research, reportedly provided by a whistleblower. And this whistleblower is not only coming forward on 60 Minutes Sunday night, but they are accusing the company “of relaxing its security safeguards for the 2020 election too soon after Election Day, which then led it to be used in the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.”

Clegg told Stelter, “I think if the assertion is that January the 6th can be explained because of social media, I just think that’s ludicrous. The responsibility for the violence on January the 6th and insurrection on that day lies squarely with the people who inflicted the violence and those who encouraged them, including then-President Trump and candidly many other people elsewhere in the media who were encouraging the assertion that the election was stolen.”

He said “it would be too easy” to suggest “all the disfiguring polarization in U.S. politics” would be fixed by a social media network changing its algorithm.

Stelter followed up by asking if Clegg is “willing to acknowledge you’ve contributed to these woes in some form.”

“Of course the way people exchange information now takes place online,” Clegg said. “Of course, we as one of the largest social media platforms have a responsibility to understand where we contribute to negative and extreme content, hate speech, misinformation, so on.”

“But I think a sweeping assertion that the violence that happened January 6th can be explained primarily, secondarily, or any other way by social media is a woeful simplification of the much wider divisions in society.”

You can watch above, via CNN.