Facebook Employees Tried to Suppress Conservative Content – Opinion

There’s a new report out about Facebook bias, and it’s not a good one for conservative outlets.

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, Facebook employees have consistently tried to suppress or de-platform outlets on the right, despite objections by managers who don’t want the political fallout. According to the WSJ, employees were involved in internal conversations on a messaging board.

The report claims that Breitbart News was the target of employees who wanted it removed from the News Tab function. They claimed that trust in the company had dropped. But a senior researcher responded that if they judged outlets on that basis, they’d have to take down big news media outlets as well. “I can also tell you that we saw drops in trust in CNN 2 years ago: would we take the same approach for them too?” the researcher wrote.

The report said that after the fact-checking system came in, with things being adjudged false by third-party fact-checkers, which would then earn “strikes,” there was more action against conservative outlets.

This has been a concern of outlets on the right for some time about the new moves and the “strikes.” So, this adds fire to those concerns, if there were employees actually acting this way behind the scenes.

This week’s scoops include more explosive information.

NY Post

Nick Clegg, the vice president of global affairs for Facebook, told workers that “we need to steel ourselves for more bad headlines in the coming days, I’m afraid,” in a Saturday memo obtained by Axios.

The new scoops were expected to come Monday from a number of news outlets that were given leaked material by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen but an embargo on the information​ collapsed Friday and more devastating reporting on the company’s internal workings could be released any time.

The story that broke the embargo on Friday involved a new whistleblower who told the Securities and Exchange Commission that Facebook routinely dismissed concerns about hate speech and the spread of misinformation over fears it would hinder the company’s growth.

We’ve written before on concerns about the possible ulterior motives with France Haugen.

The companies responded by suing Texas for enforcing a ban on Facebook, Twitter, Google and Google from disallowing conservative viewpoints. A federal court has granted Texas limited access to information about how companies moderate content. This allows them to see how and why they make those judgments.

Texas passed a law prohibiting Facebook, Twitter & Google from removing conservative viewpoints.

They sued us.

Texas will now be able to seek documents from the federal court about their content moderation.

It’s about to get interesting.https://t.co/zYzf9HYqz8 via @technology

— Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX) October 23, 2021

This could lead to some very fascinating discoveries.

According to Ben Rhodes (Democratic operative), Democrats desire Facebook’s continued crackdown.

Facebook presents a serious threat to democracy and is a major public safety risk. As with other dangerous products, Facebook requires strong government enforcement. https://t.co/bdCd2P5ci3

— Ben Rhodes (@brhodes) October 23, 2021

The idea is that the louder they shout, as he did there, the harder Facebook will comply with their content control demands.