Facebook’s senior executives interfered to allow US politicians and celebrities to post whatever they wanted on its social network, overriding rules designed to curb misinformation and harmful content, leaked internal documents suggest.
In particular, employees claim in the documents that while Facebook has long insisted that it is politically neutral, it allowed rightwing figures to break its 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”.