Facebook has fired a senior engineer who had collected evidence which showed how the social media company had been giving preferential treatment to the right wing accounts.
According to a news published in Buzzfeed, Facebook has been giving preference to the prominent conservative accounts in order to help them remove fact checks from their content.
The firing has come after Facebook employees revealed that CEO and Founder Mark Zuckerberg has been giving preferential treatment for right wing sites which has been covered in much detail in Wall Street Journal article.
Facebook deleted the video six hours after Breitbart posted it to its page, but it had already racked up 14 million views and other sites continued to share it.
“This was certainly one strike against them for misinformation, but they don’t have others in the last 90 days,” Zuckerberg reportedly said. “So by the policies that we have, which by the way I think are generally pretty reasonable on this, it doesn’t make sense to remove them.”
Despite the facebook’s fact checking rules that limit the reach of pages that repeatedly share misinformation, there had been evidences that Facebook relaxed its rules for Right Wing accounts throughout the world.
Former employees of Facebook have revealed that they were concerned Facebook gave conservative outlets preferential treatment to avoid criticisms of anti-conservative bias.
“This supposed goal of this process is to prevent embarrassing false positives against respectable content partners, but the data shows that this is instead being used primarily to shield conservative fake news from the consequences,” one former employee told NBC News.
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