Facebook has removed several Trump ads in recent months

Senior executive Nick Clegg rejects claims tech giant isn’t taking enough action on political misinformation

Facebook has removed several adverts by Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential re-election campaign from the platform, according to one of the company’s senior executives.

Former UK deputy prime minister Nick Clegg – Facebook’s vice president of global affairs and communications – rejected claims the tech giant had not done enough to tackle misinformation and said the company had pulled “a number” of Trump campaign ads.

He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “We, by the way, have removed a number of ads from Donald Trump over the last several months.”

Mr Clegg did not provide details on how many Trump adverts were removed from the platform, but suggested they were related to claims made about voting rights and the US census.

“If [politicians] say things which directly seek to repress the right for people to exercise their vote then we get rid of that ... and indeed we have done that, as far as the census is concerned, in the case of some ads run by Donald Trump.”

Facebook has faced criticism for not removing or labelling posts by Mr Trump that spread misinformation about voting by mail and – many have argued – encouraged violence against protesters.

Asked what he thought of the president’s recent remark “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” – which Mr Trump cross-posted on Twitter and Facebook – Mr Clegg said: “I thought it was abhorrent.”

However, the communications chief defended the decision not to censor the remarks, saying social media companies had to allow leaders to threaten to “deploy force”.

The former leader of the Liberal Democrats told Today: “If you read the whole post, you’ll see it was talking about Donald Trump saying that he felt the governor of Minnesota had not taken aggressive enough action at the time rioting was breaking out.”

“In other words [Mr Trump] was threatening state action. And like all social media companies we allow governments to say that they are going to deploy force if the wish to.”

Mr Clegg added: “The way to hold people to account is to criticise, mock, attack and pillory what they say – which is of course what’s happened over the last couple of weeks since he made that post.

“The idea that a private company, that in a sense has got no legitimacy to act as an arbiter of political truth ... should intervene and say, ‘You can’t say this and you can’t say that’. I think people would feel quite rightly that Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook don’t have the legitimacy to do that.”

Asked whether politicians can “literally say anything”, Mr Clegg said the company would remove anything which threatened imminent physical harm – pointing to the removal of posts by Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro about “bogus cures for the coronavirus”.

Facebook has launched an effort to boost US voter turnout and provide more authoritative information about voting ahead of this year’s presidential election.

“We will be launching America’s largest voter information and registration effort ever. We hope to help register four million US voters,” said Mr Clegg.

The company’s new “voting information centre” on Facebook and Instagram will include details on registering to vote, polling places and voting by post. It will draw the information from state election officials and local authorities.

The information hub is similar to the coronavirus information centre the company launched earlier this year in an attempt to elevate authoritative sources of information on Covid-19.

Mr Zuckerberg has continued to face criticism for not removing or labelling any of Mr Trump’s posts.

Earlier this month, he wrote: “I know many people are upset that we’ve left the president’s posts up, but our position is that we should enable as much expression as possible unless it will cause imminent risk of specific harms or dangers spelled out in clear policies.”

In a USA Today opinion piece on Tuesday, Mr Zuckerberg reaffirmed that position. “Ultimately, I believe the best way to hold politicians accountable is through voting, and I believe we should trust voters to make judgments for themselves,” he wrote.