In a rare public address last week, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg argued that it's not his platform's job to police political speech. That sounds reasonable, until you consider what he's defending: Facebook's acquiescence to the spreading of deliberate, blatant misinformation by President Donald Trump's reelection campaign.

Social media, like the mainstream press, has been pushed into unfamiliar territory by a president who doesn't merely spin facts the way politicians have always done but makes self-serving assertions that are provably false. The response to these lies shouldn't be to shrug and declare them allowable as "political speech."

There is a tradition in American politics of fudging facts in ways that go right to the line of falsehood without crossing it — when a politician cherry-picks one poll to bolster his argument on an issue, for example, without mentioning that most polls show the opposite. That's misleading, but it's not technically a lie.

What Trump has brought to the presidency is a willingness to dispense with the practice of at least technically sticking to facts. Instead, he simply lies. For example, he asserts that the economy was sinking before he took office (it was rising), or that millions of illegal immigrants voted (they didn't), or that the 2017 Republican tax cut was the largest in history (not even close). These aren't merely misleading or even debatable statements. They're utter, easily debunked lies.

Facebook's policy, as articulated by Zuckerberg at last week's Georgetown University speech, is to bar content that is violent or obscene but to leave alone the posts of political campaigns — even if they make false assertions of fact — in deference to "free expression."

For example, the Trump campaign recently posted on Facebook a false claim that former Vice President Joe Biden got a Ukrainian prosecutor fired to stop an investigation into a business connected to his son. In fact, the removal of the prosecutor was sought by numerous Western leaders and had no impact on the investigation. But when the Biden campaign sought to have the ad removed, Facebook refused, saying it wasn't the company's job to fact-check political content.

Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren dramatized the problem with that stance by buying her own Facebook ad making the deliberately false claim that Zuckerberg has endorsed Trump (he hasn't endorsed anyone), then daring Facebook to leave it up. It did.

Zuckerberg warns that policing political content could become a "slippery slope" in which tech platforms end up stifling political debate. It's a legitimate concern. That's why the policing should be done transparently, with clearly articulated standards for what constitutes mere spin and what crosses the line into outright fiction.

But to allow inarguably false information to stand unchallenged doesn't promote robust debate, it promotes lies — and that's the last thing America's democracy needs right now.

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