In the wake of the 2016 US presidential election, Facebook faced substantial criticism for its enabling of misinformation and disinformation, its reluctance to monitor and block the hate groups that were proliferating on the platform, and—most notably—the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which resulted in millions of users' data being shared for political ad targeting, without consent.
This criticism only increased during and after the 2020 election; Facebook was one of the primary tech platforms through which former President Trump and his allies pushed their baseless claims of election fraud, and on which numerous hate groups and violent plots took shape. Lies and misinformation surrounding the election culminated in the storming of the US Capitol Building on January 6, 2021—an attack that led Facebook to finally ban Trump from the platform after years of ignoring other inflammatory and misleading posts.
While Trump remains banned from using Facebook, and the company appears to be taking steps to curb its misinformation problem, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has historically pointed to nebulous notions of “free speech” and argued that it's not his place to control what people post or share. But that line of thinking has led to the platform being used as a tool of violence and genocide, and does not acknowledge the vast influence it has over a huge portion of global Internet users today.