Twitter's ex-CEO stepped up the Silicon Valley beef and attacked Facebook for being a hotbed of anti-vaxxer Bill Gates conspiracy theories

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There's an ongoing spat between Twitter and Facebook right now over whether social media platforms should fact-check politicians, after Twitter slapped warning and fact-check labels on President Trump's recent tweets.

The latest salvo is from Twitter's former CEO Dick Costolo, who pitched in to criticize Facebook.

That's after CEO Mark Zuckerberg went on Fox News to say his company wouldn't fact-check President Trump in the same way as Twitter.

Zuckerberg went on Fox News on Wednesday to talk about Twitter's decision to put fact-check labels on two tweets from Trump which claimed mail-in votes in California would be "substantially fraudulent."

Zuckerberg said Facebook wouldn't introduce similar measures. "I believe strongly that Facebook shouldn't be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online. I think in general, private companies shouldn't be, especially these platform companies, shouldn't be in the position of doing that," said the Facebook CEO.

Costolo, who was Twitter's CEO from 2010 to 2015, came after Zuckerberg following this interview by suggesting that Facebook has become a hotbed for misinformation around the coronavirus and vaccines:

"According to a recent poll, half of the people watching Zuckerberg on Fox News last night believe Bill Gates is trying to control them by implanting microchips in a coronavirus vaccine," Costolo wrote late Thursday.

"These viewers likely sat there with a phone logged into facebook [...] This facebook login controls what they see, what they'll do next, when they'll talk to others. It knows where they are, what they like, what else they're doing, what they'll buy. It largely determines whether they're happy, sad, angry. They won't get vaccinated, they won't logout."