censor speech. there are things on the internet and facebook that aren t true. it s a huge problem. do we want government to get onto facebook? it s a private company. if they want to censor their company, they can do that. getting the government to look at things people post and say what can go out, that s dangerous stuff. it s dangerous already. you ve had problems with twitter already doing that. it s a big conversation to have. thank you. the facebook dilemma continues tonight on pbs. still ahead, president trump says he s eyeing a plan to end birthright citizenship by executive order. congress may have something to say about that. hevy won a j.d.p dependability award for its midsize car-the chevy malibu. i forgot.
president does it, when a news network does it, when back benchers in congress do it. it s absolutely despicable. matt drudge called it out yesterday. he did. taking on one s party or own side is far and few between. we know about facebook s problems of keeping real fake news off its platform. what about facebook s other problem. hyper partisanship. we ll talk about that. morning joe is coming right back.
organizations. what does that actually mean, do we want a company with that size and power to be saying who should have a verified voice online or not. so they re kind of grappling with all these issues that probably should have been thought about earlier, but they re now dealing with it at the moment. when we talk about fake news in the context of facebook, it s not the fake news that trump is talking about when he talks about mainstream media. it s actually made-up stories like the pope has endorsed donald trump. the pope didn t endorse anybody in the 2016 election, but that story catches fire and is viewed as truth by a lot of people. one of the problems that we saw after the 2016 election is that there were actual russian intelligence officers who were making up fake stories and posting them on facebook and using them to recruit supporters to donald trump. this is an extremely difficult problem. i don t think it s just a facebook problem.
responsibility to monitor or basically moderate that content online. but james, the cable news environment, the internet environment was extreme well before 2016. let s go back to 2012. facebook played an oversized role in the reelection of barack obama in 2012. you didn t have the extremes there despite the fact you had cable news hosts back then saying that barack obama was a racist and wasn t even born in this country. so what happened in four years at facebook? i think a number of things happened. one is that news organizations actually started to publish on facebook, which in some ways legitimized facebook as a place for the majority of american voters to get their news. the news feed on facebook became one of the main information sources. so that legitimizizatiolegitimi