On August 6, 2020, BuzzFeed News reported that Facebook had fired an engineer who attempted to expose how the company had systematically intervened in fact checks of right-leaning content posted by the likes of Breitbart, Turning Points USA founder Charlie Kirk, former Fox Nation hosts Diamond & Silk, and right-wing propaganda network Prager University. According to the report, some Facebook employees “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.”
A Facebook spokesperson acknowledged in a statement that “when a fact checker applies a rating, we apply a label and demotion. But we are responsible for how we manage our internal systems for repeat offenders.”
BuzzFeed reported that one 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.” This led to someone at Facebook calling PolitiFact to discuss Kirk’s post, apparently pushing to see if PolitiFact would change its rating. In the end, it did not.
BuzzFeed also reported on retribution against Facebook employees who tried to speak out:
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’s “respectful communication policy.”
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.
“Personally this makes me so angry and ashamed of this company,” wrote the employee in support of their colleague.
The engineer joined the company in 2016 and most recently worked on Instagram. He left the company on Wednesday. One employee on an internal thread seen by BuzzFeed News said that they received permission from the engineer to say that the dismissal “was not voluntary.”
A journalist for a fact-checking organization also told BuzzFeed that conservatives regularly complain directly to Facebook:
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.
“Of the publishers that don’t follow the procedure, it seems to be mostly ones on the right. Instead of appealing to the fact-checker they immediately call their rep at Facebook,” said the journalist, who declined to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly. “They jump straight up and say ‘censorship, First Amendment, freedom.’”
“I think Facebook is a bit afraid of them because of the Trump administration,” they added.
Following publication of this bombshell report, a BuzzFeed journalist noted that Zuckerberg said during an all-staff call that he was cracking down on leakers.
On August 7, NBC News' Olivia Solon reported additional details from inside Facebook, including that executives removed strikes from right-wing outlets and current and former employees say the company is giving special treatment to the conservatives:
The list and descriptions of the escalations, leaked to NBC News, showed that Facebook employees in the misinformation escalations team, with direct oversight from company leadership, deleted strikes during the review process that were issued to some conservative partners for posting misinformation over the last six months. The discussions of the reviews showed that Facebook employees were worried that complaints about Facebook's fact-checking could go public and fuel allegations that the social network was biased against conservatives.
The removal of the strikes has furthered concerns from some current and former employees that the company routinely relaxes its rules for conservative pages over fears about accusations of bias.
Two current Facebook employees and two former employees, who spoke anonymously out of fear of professional repercussions, said they believed the company had become hypersensitive to conservative complaints, in some cases making special allowances for conservative pages to avoid negative publicity.
In The New York Times, Ben Smith reported that “the vast bulk of the posts getting tagged for being fully or partly false come from the right” according to “two people close to the Facebook fact-checking process.”
BuzzFeed News and NBC News reported last week that Facebook executives have acted in recent months on pleas from pro-Trump voices that they not be punished for misleading readers. It’s a sign of the pressure on the company — but also of a reality that Facebook won’t say aloud: The pro-Trump media is in the misinformation business with scale and energy that lacks parallel, and in part because simply repeating the president often means spreading misinformation.
In fact, two people close to the Facebook fact-checking process told me, the vast bulk of the posts getting tagged for being fully or partly false come from the right. That’s not bias. It’s because sites like The Gateway Pundit are full of falsehoods, and because the president says false things a lot.
That’s the messy political reality — not the sort of neat systemic answer that makes engineers comfortable. The global surge in misinformation isn’t a matter of code, or an eternal political truth, or the structure of information. It’s just how the social-media-fueled, right-wing populism of 2020 works. And while Google, Facebook and Twitter dance around to refuse saying it out loud for obvious regulatory reasons, it makes them look dishonest and, at times, as Mr. Frankel now says of his boss’s accommodations, “ridiculous.”
