Former President Donald Trump has slammed Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, alleging that the billionaire has the ability to "change the course" of presidential elections.
Trump made the remarks in a Gab post on Tuesday. Conservatives frequent the social media site, and the ex-president is still barred from using Facebook and Twitter.
Trump was referring to a New York Post story from October 13 that detailed Zuckerberg's financial contributions to two nonprofit organizations during the November 2020 election, expenditure that the newspaper said helped Joe Biden win the presidency.
Trump rails at Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg over election offices funding
The former president started his tweet by mentioning Republican Representative Jeff Fortenberry of Nebraska's 1st congressional district, who is accused of lying to the FBI about campaign contributions.
Zuckerberg reportedly spent $419 million on two nonprofits during the 2020 presidential election: the Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL) and the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR).
According to the report, "This money significantly increased Joe Biden's vote margin in crucial battleground states." Trump continued to rail at a number of people in his Gab post on Tuesday, including former FBI Director James Comey and Democratic Representative Adam Schiff, whom he had previously chastised.
Zuckerberg and Facebook have also been chastised for allowing data company Cambridge Analytica to harvest the data of more than 80 million Facebook users, raising concerns that the data may have been used to target American voters ahead of the 2016 presidential election, which Trump won.
In March of 2018, then-Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix was caught on camera by Channel 4 in the United Kingdom claiming that the company had done "all the research, all the data, all the analytics, all the targeting" for Trump's 2016 campaign. Following the release of the video, he was suspended and eventually resigned in April 2018, as per Newsweek.
Former Republican says local election offices funding should be prohibited
The Facebook CEO has been named as a defendant in a litigation in the District of Columbia stemming from the Cambridge Analytica controversy. According to the complaint, Zuckerberg "knowingly and actively participated in each decision that led to Cambridge Analytica's mass collection of Facebook user data, and Facebook's misrepresentations to users about how secure their data was," and that he "knowingly and actively participated in each decision that led to Cambridge Analytica's mass collection of Facebook user data, and Facebook's misrepresentations to users about how secure their data was."
Per Daily Mail, conservatives are now latching on statistics released in The Federalist by William Doyle, a former University of Dallas economics professor, that suggests the money may have aided Biden's campaign in Texas last year.
Hans von Spakovsky, a former Republican member of the Federal Election Commission, believes that private sponsorship of local election offices should be prohibited.
According to the New York Post, Spakovsky believes this was a carefully orchestrated attempt to turn official government election offices into get-out-the-vote operations for one political party and to insert political operatives into election offices to influence and manipulate the election's outcome.
He feels the change may have resulted in uneven voting possibilities in different areas of the state. A representative for Zuckerberg and his wife, on the other hand, insisted their contributions were lawful.
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