Failure to remove altered video shows Facebook enabled Russian election meddling: Pelosi

US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Wednesday that Facebook’s refusal to remove a heavily edited video that attempted to make her look incoherent had convinced her the company wittingly enabled Russian election interference.

“When something like Facebook says, ‘I know this is false ... - it’s a lie - but we’re showing it anyway,’ well to me it says two things. I was giving them the benefit of the doubt on Russia ... I thought it was unwittingly, but clearly, they wittingly were accomplices and enablers of false information to go across Facebook,” Pelosi said to applause at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco.

The speaker of the US House of Representatives said attacks like those on Facebook also made it more difficult to recruit candidates for public office because “why would you subject yourself to that.”

Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Pelosi’s remarks.

“There is a false video that the Republicans are putting out on Facebook,” Pelosi said.

The video of Pelosi was slowed to make her speech seem slurred and edited to make it appear she repeatedly stumbled over her words.