Republican Facebook Exec Warned in ’16 That Purging Fake News Would ‘Disproportionately Affect Conservatives’: Report

Photo credit: Alexander-Koerner, Getty-Images

In December 2016, the head of Facebook’s Washington office, a former Bush White House official, warned against a massive purge of misleading information and accounts pushing conspiracy theories from the site because the move would “disproportionately affect conservatives.”

According to an extensive story in the Washington Post, Facebook DC executive Joel Kaplan urged the company’s leadership in Silicon Valley to refrain from a “fake news” purge in a video conference call not long after Trump’s election.

“We can’t remove all of it because it will disproportionately affect conservatives,” Kaplan said, per the Post. “They don’t believe it to be fake news.”

Instead, Kaplan pleaded for patience so the company could  “develop guidelines” that he could then justify to the tech giant’s right-wing critics. That effort turned into “Project P,” an internal Facebook campaign that eventually resulted in the removal of a just a few egregious purveyors of lies and misinformation.

Facebook has drawn intense fire of late by those who question its commitment to honest democratic discourse, particularly after its widely condemned decision not to fact-check political ads in the run-up to the 2020 election. By contrast, the social media platform Twitter has banned all political ads through the next campaign cycle to avoid spreading false or misleading information.

“Critics — both outside Facebook and within its ranks — see something more akin to corporate realpolitik, a willingness to accede to political demands in an era when Republicans control most levers of power in Washington,” the Post writes. “Facebook does not speak Republican,” a former employee of Facebook’s Integrity Team told the paper. “This is what they know about Republicans: Tell them ‘yes’ or they will hurt us.”