Robert and Rebekah Mercer are funding the moderation-free Twitter alternative Parler, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Daily Beast: “Neither the hedge fund billionaire nor his daughter commented to the Journal on why, but both have financed many of the highest-profile ultra-conservative causes of recent years like Cambridge Analytica, Breitbart News, and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. The app has grown to 10 million users thanks in large part to conservatives chafing against other social networks’ content moderation policies, which, among other things, prohibit false claims that the election was stolen.”

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg “told an all-staff meeting on Thursday that former Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon had not violated enough of the company’s policies to justify his suspension,” Reuters reports.

“Bannon suggested in a video last week that FBI Director Christopher Wray and government infectious diseases expert Anthony Fauci should be beheaded, saying they had been disloyal to President Trump, who last week lost his re-election bid.”

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt “is finalizing a plan to become a citizen of the island of Cyprus, becoming one of the highest-profile Americans to take advantage of one of the world’s most controversial ‘passport-for-sale’ programs,” Recode reports.

“While it is not clear why exactly Schmidt has pursued this foreign citizenship, the new passport gives him the ability to travel to the European Union, along with a potentially favorable personal tax regime.”

As votes are being tallied across the country to determine the next president, internal Facebook data shows that the company has seen a significant increase in what it calls “violence and incitement trends,” BuzzFeed News reports.

President Trump’s Twitter account was hacked last week, after a Dutch researcher correctly guessed the president’s password: “maga2020!”, according to de Volkskrant.

“Victor Gevers, a security expert, had access to Trump’s direct messages, could post tweets in his name and change his profile. Gevers took screenshots when he had access to Trump’s account.”

Facebook will ban posts that deny the Holocaust in a reversal of a long-held and controversial policy, Bloomberg reports.

Said CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a post: “I’ve struggled with the tension between standing for free expression and the harm caused by minimizing or denying the horror of the Holocaust. My own thinking has evolved as I’ve seen data showing an increase in anti-Semitic violence.”

“Facebook said Tuesday that it is banning all QAnon accounts from its platforms, a significant escalation over its previous actions and one of the broadest rules the social media giant has put in place in its history,” NBC News reports.

The Biden campaign slammed Facebook as “the nation’s foremost propagator of disinformation about the voting process,” Axios reports.

Wrote Biden campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon: “Rather than seeing progress, we have seen regression… Facebook’s continued promise of future action is serving as nothing more than an excuse for inaction.”

“Facing crackdowns from tech companies that limit the reach of their content, leaders in the QAnon conspiracy theory movement have been urging their followers to drop the ‘QAnon’ label from their wide-ranging conspiracy theories and simply refer to their fight against a fictitious cabal of powerful baby-eating politicians without their increasingly problematic branding,” NBC News reports.

“The shift in tactics comes the same week as Twitter released new data stating that their ban on QAnon-related accounts was severely limiting the reach of the conspiracy theory.”

“The Department of Justice will ask Congress on Wednesday to adopt a new law that would hold Facebook, Google and Twitter legally accountable for the way they handle some controversial content on the Web, as the Trump administration ratchets up its attacks on social-media sites entering the 2020 election,” the Washington Post reports.

“The new request from the Justice Department is expected to come in the form of a rare, legislative proposal to be shared with lawmakers that specifically seeks to whittle down Section 230, a decades-old provision of federal law that spares websites from being held liable for content posted by their users — and their own decisions about what posts, photos and videos to leave up or take down.”

A top Facebook executive told the Financial Times it will take aggressive and exceptional measures to “restrict the circulation of content” on its platform if November’s presidential election descends into chaos or violent civic unrest.

“I don’t know how the Facebook Board of Directors or their top employees can look at themselves in the mirror… Their business plan is to make money off of poison.”

— Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in an interview with Kara Swisher on her new podcast.