Facebook Employees Begged Zuckerberg To Stop Spreading Political Lies

Posted on by Krystina Schamberger


A couple hundred Facebook employees have sent
an open letter to Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, explaining to him how his company could very
easily fix the massive misinformation problem that they have. You see these 250 plus Facebook employees
are not happy with Zuckerberg. His decision to just let whoever wants to
buy an ad, buy an ad, say whatever the hell you want. Even if we know it’s fake and false, you give
us the money, you’re good to go. And for a lot of employees at Facebook, unlike
Zuckerberg, they still have a moral compass, right? They have a conscience and they know that
this is bad. And so they sent this open letter to him where
they spelled out very clearly what Zuckerberg could do to crack down on the misinformation
from the platform he created by stealing it from other people. Um, here is what they had to say. Don’t accept political ads unless they’re
subject to third party fact checks. That seems pretty obvious. Use visual design to more strongly differentiate
between political ads and organic non ad posts, which is also a problem. You have a lot of ads on Facebook that tried
to disguise themselves as regular posts. They want that cleared up so people understand
what they’re looking at. Restrict micro targeting for political ads,
including the use of custom audiences. Since micro-targeted hides ads from as much
public scrutiny that Facebook claims keeps politicians honest. Now that’s a big one. Believe it or not, because, yeah, Facebook
has been out there claiming Zuckerberg has been claiming that, no, no, no, no, no, no. See, we can let these things happen because
the audience is going to, you know they’re going to correct it and they’re gonna to set
everything straight, except when you micro targeted and you’re only targeting conservatives
instead of liberals or liberals instead of conservatives, then that one group is going
to have their own confirmation bias. See something that isn’t true, but they’ll
believe it because it fits into their beliefs. Employees want this stopped. And I agree with them on everything. Observed pre-election silence periods for
political ads to limit the impact and scale of misinformation. Brilliant. Limit ad spending per politician or candidate
with spending by them and they’re supporting political action committees combined. Love it. Make it more visually clear to users that
political ads aren’t fact checked. Awesome. Every one of these things that they have listed
in this letter is brilliant and Facebook responded by saying, we remain committed to not censoring
political speech and we’ll continue exploring additional steps we can take to bring increased
transparency to political ads. That’s what they did to the letter. That was their a central response to it to
just say screw it. We don’t care. We don’t care what we do. We don’t care if we’re poisoning the well
of public discourse. Give us the money cause that’s all Facebook’s
about folks. This isn’t some little happy, friendly social
media site where you go to, you check up on your friends and family you haven’t seen since
college and you tell them, Oh look at this picture of my dog. Isn’t it so great? No its some moneymaking operation that doesn’t
care if they misinform you. If they allow something to blatantly lie to
you and influence your political beliefs, as long as they get paid, they don’t care. Facebook is no different than any other corporation
on this planet. Your Exxons, your Pfizers, your JP Morgans. At the end of the day, they’re run by people
who are motivated by one thing and one thing only money.

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