According to Arstechnica,Leaked internal documents show that despite the employee’s request to stop, Facebook’s senior management intervened to allow American politicians and celebrities to post any information they wanted on its social network.Employees stated in the document that although Facebook has long insisted on political neutrality, it allowed right-wingers to break rules designed to curb misinformation and harmful content after being accused of bias by conservatives.
In September 2020, just before the US presidential election, the author of an internal memo wrote that “executive employees” had “written internally that they were more willing to formally exclude political factors from the decision-making process.”
The author calls on Facebook’s leadership to build a “firewall” around its content review team to prevent this from happening, and to ensure that Facebook will not retain or delete posts due to external political and media pressure. In another internal statement dated December 2020, an employee claimed that Facebook’s public policy team blocked the decision to delete the post “when it saw a powerful political figure that could harm it.”
“In many cases, the final judgment as to whether a prominent post violates a certain written policy is made by senior management, sometimes Mark Zuckerberg,” the author added. Parts of this note were previously reported by BuzzFeed.
In another example in 2019, Zuckerberg allegedly personally participated in a decision to allow a video to make the false statement that abortion is “never necessary in medicine.” The document stated that the post was deleted by the moderator but was restored after a complaint from Republican politicians.
These documents are part of a wider cache called “Facebook Papers” that are disclosed to US regulators and provided to Congress in edited form by the legal counsel of the whistleblower Francis Hogan. A coalition of news organizations including the Financial Times has obtained the edited version received by Congress.
Facebook declined to respond to inquiries about the outcome of any discussions that separated its content team from the policy and communications team.
Facebook spokesperson Joe Osborne said: “The core of these stories is a false premise. Yes, we are a business, we make a profit, but think that we do this at the expense of people’s safety or well-being. , Misunderstood our own business interests. The fact is that we have invested 13 billion U.S. dollars and more than 40,000 people do one job: to ensure people’s safety on Facebook.”
Staff members were told to aim for “irreproachable neutrality”
A former Facebook executive told the British “Financial Times” that Zuckerberg had long told employees to aim for what he called “irreproachable neutrality.”
Employees have been told that this is particularly important for American political groups, because the company does not want to be accused of violating campaign rules for providing in-kind donations. But three other former employees said they observed how Facebook applied its rules in an inconsistent and disorganized way and gave special treatment to celebrities.
A former integrity team employee said: “For people who run Facebook, they seem to care more not to appear biased than to be unbiased. Their efforts in the former tend to make the latter worse. .”
In a memo published in July 2020 first reported by BuzzFeed, the company itself stated that it decided not to reduce the circulation of “political publishers” before the election, but pointed out that such a move may face the November voting “Shadow ban or accusation that FB is biased against certain political entities.”
Former U.S. President Donald Trump sued Facebook, Twitter, and Google in July, claiming that they illegally suppressed conservative voices. For several years, he has accused Facebook of being biased and borrowed from a 2016 report that said The company’s editorial team chose not to prioritize news of interest to conservatives.
Facebook did intervene, censoring Trump – for example, when he claimed that COVID-19 is less lethal than the flu
However, the December 2020 memorandum stated that actions to ban “repeated offenders” are often reversed because they are “affected by public policy.” The employee wrote that the company decided to exempt “publishers on the grounds that they were “sensitive” or “possible to retaliate.”
The note also stated: “In the United States, intervention seems to almost exclusively represent conservative publishers.” He specifically mentioned that Breitbart, Diamond and Silk, Charlie Kirk and PragerU received special treatment.
In a resignation statement, another employee involved in efforts to curb hate speech on the platform accused Facebook of giving Breitbart special treatment, which has been included in the company’s high-quality news label since 2018. “We made special exceptions to their written policies, and we even clearly recognized them and listed them as trusted partners in our core products,” the staff member said.
Creation of “Internal Oversight Committee”
The September 2020 memo urged the company to follow the practices of other companies, such as media that separates sales and editing, and rivals Twitter and Google, which have more unique security teams.
In comments under a separate discussion in June 2020, an employee proposed the idea of establishing an “internal oversight committee,” which is composed of Facebook employees in offices around the world to help the company make decisions. At the time, Facebook’s head of apps, Feiji-Simo, replied that Facebook has been working hard to create a small internal oversight committee team.
“It’s too obvious, it’s a conflict of interest,” a former employee of the integrity team told the Financial Times. “They should stay away from each other as much as possible and not report to the same executive.”
Recently, after the Wall Street Journal reported that it had an internal system called “cross-checking”, Facebook also faced censorship, which is sometimes used to protect some high-profile users, even if they violated Facebook’s rules. Nor will it be implemented, and this approach is called “whitelisting.”
The social media company said it is working to clean up the system, initially to censor the content of politicians, celebrities, and journalists to ensure that posts are not mistakenly deleted, but it quickly expanded to include millions of users. It said that it is gradually removing the whitelist.
Joel Kaplan, the head of Facebook’s public policy team, previously told The Washington Post that he “has been promoting fair treatment of all publishers, regardless of their ideological views,” and there has never been a whitelist that specifically removes publishers from Exempt from the rules against misinformation.
In addition, on Friday, another whistleblower filed a complaint with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The complaint was first reported by the Washington Post and reviewed by the Financial Times, saying that Facebook’s public policy team would “excessively Focus on pleasing Trump and the Trump administration”.
Facebook has previously dismissed concerns that certain figures, including Kaplan, exert political influence on its decision-making. Kaplan did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
