{"id":176214,"date":"2020-08-07T18:40:00","date_gmt":"2020-08-07T23:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2020\/08\/07\/so-not-a-surprise-4\/"},"modified":"2020-08-07T18:40:00","modified_gmt":"2020-08-07T23:40:00","slug":"so-not-a-surprise-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2020\/08\/07\/so-not-a-surprise-4\/","title":{"rendered":"So Not a Surprise"},"content":{"rendered":"

We now have a report that Facebook fired an employee after the collected information showing that senior executives interfered with the moderation process to protect right-wing sources<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The worst offender appears to be Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s VP of Global Policy, a former member of the George W. Bush administration, but it’s clear that this has to be done with the explicit support and approval Mark Zuckerberg, given that he is a control freak who has complete control of the company.<\/p>\n

This is why Dems need to get serious about antitrust with regard to the tech giants after the election:<\/p>\n

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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

While there are signs Facebook will stand up to Trump in cases where he violates its rules \u2014 as on Wednesday when it removed a video post<\/a> from the president in which he claimed that children are \u201calmost immune\u201d to COVID-19<\/a> \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

With heightened internal tensions and morale at a low point<\/a>, concerns about how the company handles fact-checked content have exploded in an internal Workplace group dedicated to misinformation policy.<\/p>\n

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 Breitbart\u2019s page<\/a>, though other accounts continued to share it.<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

But some of Facebook\u2019s own employees gathered evidence they say shows Breitbart \u2014 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<\/a> \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

On July 22, a Facebook employee posted a message to the company\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cA Breitbart escalation marked \u2018urgent: end of day\u2019 was resolved on the same day, with all misinformation strikes against Breitbart\u2019s page and against their domain cleared without explanation,\u201d the employee wrote.<\/p>\n

The same employee said a partly false rating applied to an Instagram post from Charlie Kirk was flagged for \u201cpriority\u201d escalation by Joel Kaplan, the company\u2019s vice president of global public policy. Kaplan once served in George W. Bush\u2019s administration and drew criticism for publicly supporting Brett Kavanaugh\u2019s controversial nomination to the Supreme Court.<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

Past Facebook employees, including Ya\u00ebl Eisenstat, Facebook’s former global election ads integrity lead, have expressed concerns with Kaplan\u2019s influence over content enforcement decisions. She previously told BuzzFeed News<\/a> a member of Kaplan’s Washington policy team attempted to influence ad enforcement decisions for an ad placed by a conservative organization.<\/p>\n

Facebook did not respond to questions about why Kaplan would personally intervene in matters like this.<\/p>\n

These and other interventions appear to be in violation of Facebook\u2019s official policy<\/a>, which requires publishers wishing to dispute a fact check rating to contact the Facebook fact-checking partner responsible.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt appears that policy people have been intervening in fact-checks on behalf of *exclusively* right-wing publishers, to avoid them getting repeat-offender status,\u201d wrote another employee in the company\u2019s internal \u201cmisinformation policy\u201d discussion group.<\/p>\n

Individuals that spoke out about the apparent special treatment of right-wing pages have also faced consequences. In one case, a senior Facebook engineer collected multiple instances of conservative figures receiving unique help from Facebook employees, including those on the policy team, to remove fact-checks on their content. His July post was removed because it violated the company\u2019s \u201crespectful communication policy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

News of his firing caused some Facebook employees to say that they now fear speaking critically about the company in internal discussions. One person said they were deleting old posts and comments, while another said this was \u201chardly the first time the respectful workplace guidelines have been used to snipe a prominent critic of company policies\/ethics.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

In other cases, Facebook itself will quietly remove a fact-check applied by one of its partners. That appears to be what happened with a March 25 post from Diamond and Silk. The duo wrote<\/a> on Facebook, \u201cHow the hell is allocating 25 million dollars in order to give a raise to house members, that don’t give a damn about Americans, going to help stimulate America’s economy? Tell me how? #PutAmericansBackToWorkNow.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In Mark Zuckerberg’s company, some animals are more equal than others.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We now have a report that Facebook fired an employee after the collected information showing that senior executives interfered with the moderation process to protect right-wing sources. The worst offender appears to be Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s VP of Global Policy, a former member of the George W. Bush administration, but it’s clear that this has …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[368,364,367,479,374],"class_list":["post-176214","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-corruption","tag-evil","tag-internet","tag-monopoly","tag-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176214"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176214"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176214\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}