: Zuckerberg far from politically neutral, multiple employees allege in redacted US Congress papers #IndiaNEWS #International By Nikhila NatarajanNew York, Oct 25 | Facebook top guns interfered to allow

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Zuckerberg far from politically neutral, multiple employees allege in redacted US Congress papers #IndiaNEWS #International
By Nikhila NatarajanNew York, Oct 25 | Facebook top guns interfered to allow US politicians and celebrities post whatever they wanted, overriding the networks professed high moral ground designed to curb misinformation and harmful content, leaked internal documents unveiled by The Financial Times said.
Employees have claimed that Facebook allowed right-wing figures to break the platforms own rules, after being stung by accusations of bias from conservatives.
In September 2020, just ahead of the US presidential election, the author of an internal memo wrote that director-level employees had written internally that they would prefer to formally exclude political considerations from the decision-making process, FT said in a breaking news story Monday.
In another internal note dated December 2020 and reported by FT, an employee claimed that the companys public policy team blocked decisions to take down posts when they see that they could harm powerful political actors.
In multiple cases, the final judgment about whether a prominent post violates a certain written policy are made by senior executives, sometimes Mark Zuckerberg, the author added.
In a further example from 2019, Zuckerberg was alleged to be personally involved in a decision to allow a video that made the claim that abortion is never medically necessary.
The post, which had been taken down by a moderator, was reinstated.
The documents, part of a wider cache dubbed the Facebook Papers, were disclosed to US regulators and provided to Congress in redacted form by the legal counsel of whistleblower Frances Hougen.
A consortium of media organisations have procured these redacted papers from the US Congress.
In a curtain raiser to more media attention, Haugen tweeted that she was looking forward to meeting a joint committee of British parliament Monday drafting online safety rules.
While Facebook declined to respond to FTs queries, Joe Osborne, a Facebook spokesperson, said: At the heart of these stories is a premise which is false. Yes, were a business and we make profit, but the idea that we do so at the expense of peoples safety or wellbeing misunderstands where our own commercial interests lie. The truth is weve invested bn and have over 40,000 people to do one job: keep people safe on Facebook.
A former Facebook executive told the FT that Zuckerberg had long told staff to aim for what he called unimpeachable neutrality.
But three other former employees said they observed how Facebook applied its own rules in an inconsistent and haphazard way, with special treatment for celebrities.
One former integrity team employee said: For the people running Facebook, it seems like they care much more about not appearing biased than actually not being biased.

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