“The reports of hateful and violent posts on Facebook started pouring in on the night of May 28 last year, soon after then-President Donald Trump sent a warning on social media that looters in Minneapolis would be shot. It had been three days since Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on the neck of George Floyd for more than eight minutes until the 46-year-old Black man lost consciousness, showing no signs of life. A video taken by a bystander had been viewed millions of times online. Protests had taken over Minnesota’s largest city and would soon spread throughout cities across America. But it wasn’t until after Trump posted about Floyd’s death that the reports of violence and hate speech increased ‘rapidly’ on Facebook across the country, an internal company analysis of the ex-president’s social media post reveals.”

“‘These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd and I won’t let that happen,’ Trump wrote at 9:53 a.m. on May 28 from his Twitter and Facebook accounts. ‘Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts the shooting starts!’ The former president has since been suspended from both Twitter and Facebook. Leaked Facebook documents provide a first-hand look at how Trump’s social media posts ignited more anger in an already deeply divided country that was eventually lit ‘on fire’ with reports of hate speech and violence across the platform. Facebook’s own internal, automated controls, meant to catch posts that violate rules, predicted with almost 90% certainty that Trump broke the tech company’s rules against inciting violence. Yet, the tech giant took no action on Trump’s message. Offline, the next day, protests – some of which turned violent – engulfed nearly every U.S. city, big and small” the AP reports.

One thing that’s important to understand here and not 100% clarified in the AP article is that Trump himself never posted directly to Facebook, but there was an API configured to automatically duplicate all of the tweets, immediately as they were posted, from the @realDonaldTrump Twitter account to Trump’s verified official Facebook page. Everyone automatically associates Trump with his obnoxious, hateful tweets, and correctly so, but when talking about his reach on Facebook it should also be noted that it was 100% the same content.