Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
At one point in time, Facebook’s relationship with politicians was relatively uncontroversial.
But after the 2016 US elections, everything changed.
Early in the campaign, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump tested the limits of Facebook’s rules against hateful speech at the same time that the company became a vehicle of political exploitation by foreign actors.
Facebook’s first test: dealing with Trump’s 2015 Facebook post calling for a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslims entering the US. While some inside the company saw a strong argument that Trump’s comments violated Facebook’s rules against religious hate speech, the company decided to keep the post up. Until then, most Facebook employees had never before grappled with the…