Last Updated on January 16, 2021
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) now levies blame for the January 6 Capitol Hill protest on Facebook, where users allegedly used the platform’s event planning function to coordinate the storming of the U.S. Capitol.
As the New York Post reported, Ocasio-Cortez claimed that Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg “Is part of this problem.” She added, “And Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook bear partial responsibility for Wednesday’s events, period.”
Apparently noting that Zuckerberg has dined with Jared Kushner and other Trump allies, Ocasio-Cortez slammed Zuckerberg for having “dinner parties with white supremacist sympathizers.”
“They specifically treated this type of radicalization differently, aka with kid gloves,” she added.
Ocasio-Cortez also claimed that Facebook has allied with white supremacists, as is apparently evidenced by their reliance on The Daily Caller, founded by Tucker Carlson but now completely divorced from the Fox News personality, as a third party fact checker.
She then claimed that Zuckerberg and Facebook had advanced knowledge of the Capitol Hill protest, and that banning President Donald Trump from the platform is an example of “damage control.”
“Currently they’re doing as much damage control as possible,” she said on Friday. “But they knew,” she said. “And not only did they know, but they allowed it.”
Big tech giants Amazon, Apple, and Google all seemingly worked in concert to remove Parler from the Internet in the days immediately following the protest. The conservative-leaning, Mercer-funded platform was first banned from the Google Play app store, then the Apple app store. Finally, their ban from the Internet was cemented after Amazon Web Services terminated their agreement and stopped hosting the platform.
Most of this deplatforming of a competing platform came as a direct result of claims that Parler was used to coordinate the Capitol Hill protest, and specifically by protesters who entered the sanctified and austere grounds of the U.S. Capitol building.
