Employees pleaded with Facebook to stop letting politicians bend rules

Enlarge / One hundred cardboard cutouts of Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg stand outside the US Capitol in Washington, DC, April 10, 2018. (credit: Saul Loeb | Getty Images)

Facebook's senior executives interfered to allow US politicians and celebrities to post whatever they wanted on its social network despite pleas from employees to stop, leaked internal documents suggest.

Employees claim in the documents that while Facebook has long insisted that it is politically neutral, it allowed rightwing figures to break rules designed to curb misinformation and harmful content, after being stung by accusations of bias from conservatives.

In September 2020, just ahead of the US presidential election, the author of an internal memo wrote that director-level employees" had written internally that they would prefer to formally exclude political considerations from the decision-making process."

Read 27 remaining paragraphs | Comments