After months of debate and disagreement over the handling of inflammatory or misleading posts from Donald Trump, Facebook employees want CEO Mark Zuckerberg to explain what the company would do if the leader of the free world uses the social network to undermine the results of the 2020 US presidential election.
I do think were headed for a problematic scenario where Facebook is going to be used to aggressively undermine the legitimacy of the US elections, in a way that has never been possible in history, one Facebook employee wrote in a group on Workplace, the companys internal communication platform, earlier this week.
For the past week, this scenario has been a topic of heated discussion inside Facebook and was a top question for its leader. Some 2,900 employees asked Zuckerberg to address it publicly during a company-wide meeting on Thursday, which he partly did, calling it "an unprecedented position."
Zuckerbergs remarks came amid growing internal concerns about the company's competence in handling misinformation, and the precautions it is taking to ensure its platform isnt used to disrupt or mislead ahead of the US presidential election. Though Facebook says it has committed more money and resources to avoid repeating its failures during the 2016 election, some employees believe it isnt enough. President Trump has already spent months raising questions about the legitimacy of the upcoming 2020 election, spreading misinformation about mail-in ballots, and declining to say if hed accept the possibility of losing to Democratic nominee Joe Biden in November.
In July, Trump told Fox News he wasnt sure if hed concede to Biden, casting doubt on whether there would be a peaceful transition of power if the former vice president wins the election. "I have to see. I'm not just going to say yes. I'm not going to say no," the president said.
On Facebooks internal message boards, discussion about the Trump election question remained civil prior to Thursdays all-hands meeting. Employees debated the merits of censoring a sitting presidents potentially false statements about election results with one person noting that it would be a really troubling policy to apply globally.
"America can't afford for Facebook to take a wait-and-see approach when it comes to the integrity of our democracy, said Jesse Lehrich, a former foreign policy spokesperson to Hillary Clinton and cofounder of Accountable Tech, a nonprofit advocacy group. Unless they proactively outline clear policies and enforcement mechanisms to safeguard the election, the platform will be weaponized to undermine it."
On Thursday, Zuckerberg told employees that the increased use of mail-in ballots due to the pandemic will likely lead to a situation where election results will not be available "for days" or "for weeks." He noted political figures and commentators may attempt to try to call an election early, in which case the company may label a post explaining that results are not yet final. ... While there are signs Facebook will stand up to Trump in cases where he violates its rules as on Wednesday when it removed a video post from the president in which he claimed that children are almost immune to COVID-19 there are others who suggest the company is caving to critical voices on the right. In another recent Workplace post, a senior engineer collected internal evidence that showed Facebook was giving preferential treatment to prominent conservative accounts to help them remove fact-checks from their content.
The company responded by removing his post and restricting internal access to the information he cited. On Wednesday the engineer was fired, according to internal posts seen by BuzzFeed News.
With heightened internal tensions and morale at a low point, concerns about how the company handles fact-checked content have exploded in an internal Workplace group dedicated to misinformation policy.
Last Friday, at another all-hands meeting, employees asked Zuckerberg how right-wing publication Breitbart News could remain a Facebook News partner after sharing a video that promoted unproven treatments and said masks were unnecessary to combat the novel coronavirus. The video racked up 14 million views in six hours before it was removed from Breitbarts page, though other accounts continued to share it.
Zuckerberg danced around the question but did note that Breitbart could be removed from the company's news tab if it were to receive two strikes for publishing misinformation within 90 days of each other. (Facebook News partners, which include dozens of publications such as BuzzFeed News and the Washington Post, receive compensation and placement in a special news tab on the social network.)
This was certainly one strike against them for misinformation, but they don't have others in the last 90 days, Zuckerberg said. So by the policies that we have, which by the way I think are generally pretty reasonable on this, it doesn't make sense to remove them.
But some of Facebooks own employees gathered evidence they say shows Breitbart along with other right-wing outlets and figures including Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, Trump supporters Diamond and Silk, and conservative video production nonprofit Prager University has received special treatment that helped it avoid running afoul of company policy. They see it as part of a pattern of preferential treatment for right-wing publishers and pages, many of which have alleged that the social network is biased against conservatives.
We defer to third-party fact-checkers on the rating that a piece of content receives," Facebook spokesperson Liz Bourgeois said in a statement. "When a fact checker applies a rating, we apply a label and demotion. But we are responsible for how we manage our internal systems for repeat offenders. We apply additional system wide penalties for multiple false ratings, including demonetization and the inability to advertise, unless we determine that one or more of those ratings does not warrant additional consequences."
On July 22, a Facebook employee posted a message to the companys internal misinformation policy group noting that some misinformation strikes against Breitbart had been cleared by someone at Facebook seemingly acting on the publication's behalf.
A Breitbart escalation marked urgent: end of day was resolved on the same day, with all misinformation strikes against Breitbarts page and against their domain cleared without explanation, the employee wrote.
The same employee said a partly false rating applied to an Instagram post from Charlie Kirk was flagged for priority escalation by Joel Kaplan, the companys vice president of global public policy. Kaplan once served in George W. Bushs administration and drew criticism for publicly supporting Brett Kavanaughs controversial nomination to the Supreme Court. ... Past Facebook employees, including Yal Eisenstat, Facebook's former global election ads integrity lead, have expressed concerns with Kaplans influence over content enforcement decisions. She previously told BuzzFeed News a member of Kaplan's Washington policy team attempted to influence ad enforcement decisions for an ad placed by a conservative organization. ... Continued