Facebook on fake Pelosi video: Being 'false' isn't enough for removal

Facebook said Friday that a video doctored to depict House Speaker Nancy Pelosi slurring her words will remain on the social network because false information alone does not violate the site's rules.

"We remove things from Facebook that violate our Community Standards, and we don't have a policy that stipulates that the information you post on Facebook must be true," a company spokesperson said in a statement shared with POLITICO.

The social network said it will, however, greatly reduce distribution of the video among Facebook users' News Feeds and add context from two third-party fact checkers who deemed it false after Facebook asked them to review it. One of the two fact checkers, Politifact, gave the video its "Pants on Fire" appellation, reserved for the most egregious falsehoods making "ridiculous claim[s]."

The incarnation of the video, posted to a Facebook page called Politics WatchDog, that caught the greatest media attention after first being spotted by the Washington Post Thursday didn't have any fact-checking information tagged to it as of Friday afternoon. At that point, it had been viewed roughly 2.5 million times.

The video, which uses real footage of Pelosi (D-Calif.) slowed down by 25 percent, has circulated widely since Thursday. It comes amid a pitched battle between Pelosi and President Donald Trump, with each leader depicting the other as incompetent. And it is the latest chapter in an ongoing debate over how and whether companies like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube should police their networks for problematic content.

Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani tweeted the video Thursday. He later deleted the tweet but appeared to subsequently defend it, writing, "Nancy Pelosi wants an apology for a caricature exaggerating her already halting speech pattern. First she should withdraw her charge which hurts our entire nation when she says the President needs an 'intervention."

Facebook on Friday reused a statement it has deployed in the past to respond to similar incidents, including last year to address a pattern of falsehoods and misinformation from far-right provocateur Alex Jones (he and his flagship InfoWars account have since been banned from Facebook). The statement in part says Facebook believes "reducing the distribution of inauthentic content" strikes the right balance between free speech and safety and concludes of certain misinformation, "we allow people to post it as a form of expression, but we're not going to show it at the top of News Feed."

Google subsidiary YouTube made a different decision, saying in a statement, "YouTube has clear policies that outline what content is not acceptable to post and we remove videos violating these policies when flagged to us. These videos violated our policies and have been removed. They also did not surface prominently. In fact, search results and watch next panels about Nancy Pelosi include videos from authoritative sources, usually at the top."

Facebook's decision Friday angered some Pelosi allies on Capitol Hill. Tweeted Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI), chairman of the House's antitrust subcommittee, "Hey @facebook, you are screwing up. Again. Fix this now!"

Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine