President Trump vowed on Tuesday he would be “looking into” Facebook’s blocking of a staffer’s account.
Trump made the pledge in a tweet, writing “I will be looking into this!”
Trump’s social media manager Dan Scavino on Monday posted a screenshot on Facebook showing the social media network temporarily blocking him from public comments on one of his posts, saying some of them had been reported as spam. Scavino accused the social network of “silencing” him in his post, which drew more than 1,000 comments.
{mosads}A Facebook spokesperson attributed Scavino’s account being blocked to the platform’s capping of “identical, repetitive activity” coming from a single account in a short time frame. The spokesperson added that such limits can have “the unintended consequence” of temporarily blocking “real people like Dan Scavino,” and said the social media giant had apologized for the “inconvenience.”
“In order to stop automated bots, we cap the amount of identical, repetitive activity coming from one account in a short period of time, such as @mentioning people,” the spokesperson said. “These limits can have the unintended consequence of temporarily preventing real people like Dan Scavino from engaging in such activity, but lift in an hour or two, which is what happened in this case. We’ve been in touch with him and have apologized for the inconvenience.”
Trump earlier on Tuesday tweeted that Facebook, Google and Twitter were “on the side of the radical left Democrats,” although he did not allude to Scavino in that post.
The accusations come after several days of criticism of the tech giant from all sides, including claims it took inadequate action to remove livestreamed video of a mass shooting at two mosques in New Zealand. Earlier this morning, Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.), chairman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law, called for an antitrust investigation of Facebook in a New York Times op-ed.
Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, sued Twitter and some of its users on Monday for more than $250 million.
He said Twitter has censored conservative voices by “shadow-banning” them, which he said may have impacted the midterm elections in which Republicans lost the House.