A week after Facebook and Twitter suspended the accounts of US President Donald Trump permanently, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has said that these actions have come too late. He blamed the social media giants for allowing Trump to allegedly spread misinformation for a long time, saying the president was being abusive to people.
In an interview with AFP, Jimmy Wales said, “With Donald Trump, they did a poor job of dealing with him for a very, very long time.” He added, “He was clearly spreading disinformation, he was clearly being abusive to people.”
Wales said that Twitter and Facebook had consistently “struggled with misinformation, disinformation” allegedly peddled by Donald Trump. He asserted that the responsibility for the unprecedented events in Washington DC rested “100 percent at the feet of Donald Trump”.
The Wikipedia founder, who has known bias towards the left like the Twitter and Facebook executives, said that the Social Media platforms will struggle due to their business model. “They have a business model that says, ‘We need as many eyeballs as possible, we need as many page views as possible’. Now it’s also damaging for their brand. So they have to deal with that. But I think they’re going to struggle,” he said.
After the supporters of Donald Trump had stormed the Capitol Hill in Washington DC last week, Facebook and Twitter had permanently suspended the accounts of Donald Trump, accusing of him inciting violence. After that, several other platforms have banned Donald Trump and his supporters from their sites. These include Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, Twitch etc. Several other platforms like Reddit, TikTok, Pinterest, Discord etc have restricted content related to Trump.
