It’s been nearly a week since former Facebook employees blew the whistle on the social media giant, claiming that trending conservative news stories were routinely suppressed.
I can’t say with confidence whether these reports of Facebook’s perfidy were permitted to trend on Facebook, but late Thursday, the company’s founder and, CEO Mark Zuckerberg, made a statement. The venue he chose? Facebook, of course.
Not surprisingly, some of the language Zuckerberg used — particularly, the assurance that “we take this report very seriously and are conducting a full investigation to ensure our teams upheld the integrity of this product” — sounds straight out of the Facebook guidelines:
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
The part about “inviting leading conservatives … to share their points of view” is interesting primarily because Zuckerberg doesn’t name names. Likely, Donald Trump isn’t one of them, and not entirely because the Republican front-runner has intimated he is not a conservative. It is rather because in early March, according to Gizmodo, Facebook employees were asked to vote on the the site’s “responsibility … to help prevent President Trump in 2017?”
The article went on to note:
It’s not particularly surprising the question was asked, or that some Facebook employees are anti-Trump. The question and Zuckerberg’s statements … align with the consensus politics of Silicon Valley: pro-immigration, pro-trade, pro-expansion of the internet.
As Joe Newby noted in mid-April, Zuckerberg has also been openly critical of Trump’s “wall,” even though the Facebook CEO hypocritically created a wall of his own: To protect his family, he bought up every home in the community he lives in.