Thursday, February 20, 2020

Fear

I think efforts to make platforms like facebook moderate content to "our" liking are inevitably doomed for a variety of reasons, but they have always had a very hands on approach to such things and they should at least live up to whatever rules they claim to have established.
In a world of perfect neutrality, which Facebook espouses as its goal, the political tilt of the pages shouldn’t have mattered. But in a videoconference between Facebook’s Washington office and its Silicon Valley headquarters in December 2016, the company’s most senior Republican, Joel Kaplan, voiced concerns that would become familiar to those within the company.

“We can’t remove all of it because it will disproportionately affect conservatives,” said Kaplan, a former George W. Bush White House official and now the head of Facebook’s Washington office, according to people familiar with the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect professional relationships.