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Facebook employees ask CEO, Mark Zuckerberg if they should help derail Trump’s presidency bid

Facebook staff posed the question as part of a internal poll which allows employees to vote on what to ask CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a weekly Q&A, Gizmodo reports.

For the March 4 session, the fifth most popular question with 61 votes was; ‘What responsibility does Facebook have to help prevent President Trump in 2017?’

Facebook insists that it does not try and influence the way people vote.

But it would not be the first time the company has got involved with politics.

In 2010 the firm conducted a 61-million-person experiment to discover if Facebook could affect American’s voting behaviors.

They posted an ‘I voted’ button on 98 percent of users’ Facebook walls which also allowed them to see how many of their friends had voted, and the location of local polling station.

But two percent saw a completely different message.

One percent saw the voting button but were not able to see which friends had already voted, while the remaining group saw no message at all.

Facebook found that the experiment had resulted in a 0.14 percent increase in voter turnout – at total of 340,000 people.

A 2012 experiment, found that by promoting hard news posts on Facebook users’ walls, resulted in an increased voter turnout.

But this is first time the firm has debated influencing who people vote for.

If Facebook did decide to work against Trump, it could have a devastating effect on The Donald which has run a hugely effective publicity campaign.

Legally, Facebook are not required to stay neutral in the 2016 presidential race. The company would be in its right, under the First Amendment, to remove all pro-Trump stories from its site – and would not have to inform its users it was doing so.

Zuckerberg is also fiercely anti-Trump, and spoke out against the Republican front runner during the company’s annual F8 developer conference.

Donald Trump at one of his presidential campaigns. Image Credit: Independent
Donald Trump at one of his presidential campaigns. Image Credit: Independent

‘I hear fearful voices calling for building walls and distancing people they label as ‘others,’ said the CEO, who did not mention Trump by name.

‘I hear them calling for blocking free expression, for slowing immigration, for reducing trade, and in some cases, even for cutting access to the internet.’

But while Zuckerberg and many of his employees may not be voting for Trump in the election, Facebook says it will not try to influence how any of its users vote.

‘We encourage any and all candidates, groups, and voters to use our platform to share their views on the election and debate the issues,’ a spokesperson said in a statement to The Hill.

‘We as a company are neutral — we have not and will not use our products in a way that attempts to influence how people vote.’

[Daily Mail]

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One Comment

  1. This is why news in social media should be viewed like getting news in your email. It’s propaganda based, amateurish and driven by the great virtual world high school popularity contest seekers- “social media users”. It doesn’t have to be true, it just has to be “popular.” Additionally when companies like Apple and Facebook borrowed from Nazi Germany and use technology as a tool of propaganda and sheep shaping (the CEO of Facebook has already made his political agenda known in public), then the best solution is to destroy that technology.

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