At the end of her weekly press conference on Thursday, a reporter asked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) if she thinks Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg wield too much power.
Facebook makes a fortune knowingly and intentionally disseminating political lies and misinformation, and that was clearly on Pelosi’s mind as she delivered a frank and damning response.
“The Facebook business model is strictly to make money,” she said. “They don’t care about the impact on children, they don’t care about truth, they don’t care about where this is all coming from. And they have said even if they know it’s not true they will print it.”
Fact check: True.
“I think that they have been very abusive of the great opportunity that technology has given them,” Pelosi continued.
“All they want are their tax cuts and no anti-trust action against them. And they schmooze this administration in that regard because so far that’s what they have received.”
Pelosi then alluded to the role Facebook played in the last presidential election, and warned that this time around, the company will knowingly play a similar role.
“They have said very blatantly, very clearly, that they intend to be accomplices for misleading the American people, with money from God knows where. They didn’t even check on the money from Russia in the last election. They never even thought they should.”
Fact check: Also true. As part of Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election, a Kremlin-backed troll farm that called itself the “Internet Research Agency” paid for at least 3,000 divisive political ads on Facebook. The company accepted payment for the spots in Russian rubles.
Those ads were in addition to other Russian efforts to sway public opinion on social media in favor of Donald Trump. A 2018 Senate Intelligence Committee report found thousands of covert Russian accounts on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit and Pinterest amassed millions of followers and hundreds of millions of social engagements.
Facebook didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.