Zuckerberg defends Bannon after ex-Trump adviser calls for US officials to be beheaded

PALO ALTO: Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg has defended Steve Bannon, former White House chief strategist and an ex-adviser of US President Donald Trump, who had called for two American officials to be beheaded, according to a recording of the meeting he made the comments in.

Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive officer of Facebook, told an all-staff meeting on Thursday that Bannon did not violate enough of the social media platform's policies to justify his suspension, according to a recording heard by Reuters, after the former Trump aide called for violence against FBI Director Christopher Wray and the US government's  infectious diseases expert, Dr Anthony Fauci.

Steve Bannon had suggested in a video posted on November 5 that Wray and Dr Fauci should be beheaded because they had been disloyal to US President Donald Trump, who last week lost his re-election bid to Biden.

“I’d put the heads on pikes. Right. I’d put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats. You either get with the program or you are gone,” the former White House official had said in the video.

Zuckerberg acknowledged criticism of Facebook by President-elect Joe Biden but said the company shared some of the same concerns about social media by the Democrat's team. He urged employees not to jump to conclusions about how the new administration might approach regulation of social media companies.

Facebook removed the video but left up Bannon's page, which has about 175,000 followers. Twitter banned Bannon last week over the same content.

“We have specific rules around how many times you need to violate certain policies before we will deactivate your account completely,” Zuckerberg said. “While the offenses here, I think, came close to crossing that line, they clearly did not cross the line.”

Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone said the company would take further action against Bannon’s page “if there are additional violations.”

A Bannon spokesperson said his comments were “clearly meant metaphorically” and alluded to a reference Bannon had made the day prior to the treason trial of Thomas More in Tudor England “for rhetorical purposes.”

“Mr. Bannon did not, would not and has never called for violence of any kind,” the spokesperson, Alexandra Preate, said in a statement.

Last Friday, Facebook took down a network of other Bannon-linked pages that were pushing false claims about the presidential election after they were flagged to the world’s biggest social media company by activist group Avaaz.

Avaaz said seven of the largest pages had amassed nearly 2.5 million followers. Stone said Facebook had removed “several clusters of activity for using inauthentic behavior tactics to artificially boost how many people saw their content.”

Zuckerberg spoke on the issue at a weekly forum with Facebook employees where he is sometimes asked to defend content and policy decisions. A staff member had asked why Bannon had not been banned.

Another employee asked how Facebook was handling criticism of Facebook by Biden and members of his team. Biden had told the New York Times in December last year that he had “never been a fan of Facebook” and considered Zuckerberg “a real problem.”

The incoming administration was “not monolithic”, Zuckerberg said. “Just because some people might talk in a way that’s more antagonistic to us, it doesn’t necessarily mean that speaks for what the whole group or whole administration is going to stand for.”

Bannon was arrested in August and has pleaded not guilty to charges of defrauding hundreds of thousands of donors to the $25 million “We Build the Wall” campaign. Bannon has dismissed the charges as politically motivated.

As Trump’s chief White House strategist, Bannon helped articulate Trump’s “America First” policy. Trump fired him in August 2017, ending Bannon’s turbulent tenure.