‘The OANN and Newsmax Problem’: Former Facebook Official Compares Conservative ‘Disinformation’ to ISIS, Calls For Censorship
According to Stamos, One America News Network (OANN) and Newsmax, “are trying now to outflank Fox on the right because the moment Fox [News] introduced any kind of realism into their reporting, immediately a bunch of people chose to put themselves into a sealed ecosystem.”
“They can do that both on cable. They can do it online, and that becomes a huge challenge in figuring out how do you bring people back into the mainstream of fact-based reporting and try to get us back into the same consensual reality.”
Brian Stelter, host of “Reliable Sources,” then asked Stamos whether that goal was even possible.
“It’s hard. I think we got to do a couple of things,” Stamos replied. “One, there needs to be an intentional work by the social media companies collaborating together to work on violent extremism in the same way they worked on ISIS. When I started at Facebook in 2015, the number one challenge from a content perspective was the abuse of social media by the Islamic State. And there was a collaboration between the tech companies, and between the tech companies and law enforcement, to make it impossible for them to use the internet to recruit and radicalize mostly young Muslim men at the time around the world.”
Stamos then continued to compare the problem of handling Islamic radicalization online with domestic political disputes, including directly comparing the strategies of ISIS and Republicans in Congress.
“Now we’re talking about a domestic audience in the United States and the challenge is going to be partially that ISIS did not have a domestic constituency in the United States Congress, but over half of the Republicans in Congress voted to overturn the election.”