Facebook employees collected evidence showing the company is giving right-wing pages preferential treatment when it comes to misinformation. And they’re worried about how the company will handle the president’s falsehoods in an election year.
— 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.
But some of Facebook’s own employees gathered evidence they say shows Breitbart — 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— has received special treatment that helped it avoid running afoul of company policy.
The same employee said a partly false rating applied to an Instagram post from Charlie Kirk was flagged for “priority” escalation by Joel Kaplan, the company’s vice president of global public policy. Kaplan once served in George W. Bush’s administration and drew criticism for publicly supporting Brett Kavanaugh’s controversial nomination to the Supreme Court.
Facebook did not respond to questions about why Kaplan would personally intervene in matters like this. After the engineer’s post was removed, the related internal “tasks” he’d cited as examples of the alleged special treatment were made private and inaccessible to employees, according to a Workplace post from another employee.
Facebook denied the employee had been terminated for the post but said it was because"they broke the company's rules." Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook's Vice President of Global Public Policy Joel Kaplan chat after leaving a meeting with Sen. John Cornyn on Capitol Hill in September 2019.The internal evidence gathered by the engineer aligns with the experience of a journalist who works for one of Facebook’s US fact-checking partners. They told BuzzFeed News that conservative pages often complain directly to the company.
According to the post, Joel Kaplan flagged a fact check of a Charlie Kirk Instagram post for resolution “ASAP/before 12 p.m. ET”. This same employee claimed PragerU's partner manager was part of a “two weeks long effort” to prevent the site from being given Repeat Offender status, a designation that would have limited its reach and advertising privileges.
“We have had discussions where our partners have asked us, ‘Why did you fact check this? Why did you come to this conclusion? How do you think it fits within the scope of Facebook's rules or regulations within fact-checking?’” he said. His Other 98% page is currently at risk of deletion because it has three strikes. Provost said one strike is for a hate speech violation three months ago, though as of now no one at Facebook has told him what the offending post was. His partner representative said they would look into it, according to Provost. That was last week and he says he still hasn’t received an update.
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