How Donald Trump changed Facebook

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Facebook's relationship with politicians was not controversial at one point.

Everything changed after the election.

At the same time that Facebook became a vehicle of political exploitation by foreign actors, Donald Trump was testing the limits of the company's rules against hate speech.

The first test for Facebook is dealing with Trump's 2015 Facebook post calling for a "total and complete shutdown" of Muslims entering the U.S. The company decided to keep the post up despite the fact that some inside the company believed that Trump's comments were against the rules of Facebook. Most Facebook employees had never considered the possibility that their platform could be used to stoke division by a political candidate.

When the leading candidate for president posts an attack on one of the biggest religions in the world, what do you do?

It wasn't just national politicians that Facebook was worried about. Despite Mark Zuckerberg dismissing the idea that fake news on the platform could influence elections, it soon became clear that propaganda from Russian accounts had reached millions of American voters.

At the same time, he tried to minimize the company's role in dictating the acceptable terms of political speech, while acknowledging Facebook's role as "The Fifth Estate", an entity as powerful as the government and media.

The Oversight Board was set up to weigh in on controversial content decisions, including how to deal with Trump's account. We still don't know how much power the board has over the social networking site. The terms of Facebook's platform still need to be dictated by the social network. Can the board change the social media platform's recommendation engines?

In the fourth episode of Land of the Giants, we look at Facebook's role in helping to moderate political speech. The stories of Facebook's journey to becoming Meta have been told in seven episodes by Recode and The Verge.

You can listen to the fourth episode of Land of the Giants: The Facebook / Meta Disruption on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.