Employees Respond to Facebook’s Political Ad Policies
By Kyra Kozin ‘23
Political ads on Facebook have been a controversial topic since the 2016 election, and new controversy recently arose when in early October the Trump campaign released an ad containing false information on Biden. News sources like CNN refused to air the ad, but Facebook showed the ad on its site and rejected a request from Biden’s campaign to take it down. Facebook took the position that even ads with misleading content are an important part of politics and discussions surrounding it, citing free speech and freedom of expression as reasoning to refuse the moderation of political speech. Previously, it seemed as though Facebook was working towards combating the issue of misinformation on the site, with political ads containing claims deemed false by fact checkers being prohibited, but now their new policy is that politicians have almost complete freedom over what content they post on the site.
Facebook has been receiving widespread criticism for this decision, even from within the company. Just recently, more than 250 Facebook employees signed an open letter written to Mark Zuckerberg and the top executives at Facebook. This letter denounced Facebook’s decision to let politicians post any claims they want on the website, even those that are misleading or false. In the letter, the employees emphasized that Facebook represents people expressing their different voices and views, so the fact that Facebook is allowing the spread of misinformation is frightening them. The letter states that free speech and paid speech are not the same thing in an argument to stop the spread of misinformation. The employees protest Facebook’s current fact checking policies for political ads, reasoning that they not only allow politicians to take advantage of Facebook’s platform to target naive voters, but lessen the integrity of Facebook, increase public distrust in the quality of their news, and send a message that Facebook is content with profiting from deliberate misinformation campaigns. Then, the writers of the letter suggest proposals for improvement, which were to treat political ads the same as other ads in terms of misinformation, to help people recognize which ads are political through design, to limit targeting of political ads, to comply with election silence period rules, to restrict the amount an individual politician can spend on ads, and to have clearer policies for political ads.
Although this letter signed by 250 employees only consisted of a small fraction of the more than 35,000 employee company, it has furthered the discussion on whether or not politicians should be allowed to post anything they want in Facebook ads because now it is clear there is dissent within the company. Yet, Facebook remains adamant about the fact that they will not censor political speech. In a statement, a Facebook spokesman did, however, promise to explore increasing transparency of political ads aired on the website, but this isn’t enough action for many critics of the company policy including myself, especially considering their slowness to respond to misinformation spread since the 2016 presidential election.
This public dissent within the ranks of Facebook’s employees against the executive management is striking because Facebook employees have historically been very supportive of their management’s policy decisions, especially compared to their peer companies, Google and Amazon. Critics of Facebook’s current policies hope that this open letter marks a shift in employees gaining awareness of their responsibilities to the public and to democracy. This letter also has significance because it is part of a trend that has been happening in other large technology companies of increasingly responding to employee activism, like Google and Amazon have in the past few years. We are currently in a time where people feel much more empowered than they have in the past to stand up for the causes they are passionate about, and this has translated into increased activism within companies. In the next 2-5 years, it’s likely that not only will Facebook have increased levels of employee activism, but employees at other mammoth corporations will do the same. So although Facebook remains committed at the moment to keeping all political speech uncensored, the trend of employee activism suggests that they will start listening more and more to their employees in the future who protest their policy choices.
