Facebook Fired An Employee Who Collected Evidence Of Right-Wing Pages Getting Preferential Treatment

Facebook employees collected evidence company giving right-wing pages preferential treatment when it comes to misinformation... worried how the company will handle the president’s falsehoods in an election year... Facebook is going to be used to aggressively undermine the legitimacy of the US elections...

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. The company responded by removing his post and restricting internal access to the information he cited. On Wednesday the engineer was fired...

Joel Kaplan, the company’s vice president of global public policy ... Kaplan's Washington policy team ... intervening in fact-checks on behalf of *exclusively* right-wing publishers ... violation of Facebook’s official policy... to contact the Facebook fact-checking partner responsible...

some Facebook employees ... now fear speaking critically ... in internal discussions...

conservative pages ... Instead of appealing to the fact-checker they immediately call their rep at Facebook... Facebook is a bit afraid of them because of the Trump administration... Facebook assigns partner managers to pages with large followings or big ad budgets ... appear to have sought preferential treatment for right-wing publishers ... cite ad volume as a reason for not acting against a group of pages ... Facebook itself will quietly remove a fact-check applied by one of its partners ...