Zuckerberg defends allowing false ads on Facebook, saying company shouldn’t be ‘censoring’
Mark Zuckerberg has again defended his decision to keep fake and misleading political ads on Facebook, claiming the social-media behemoth isn’t in the censorship business.
“What I believe is that in a democracy, it’s really important that people can see for themselves what politicians are saying, so they can make their own judgments,” Zuckerberg told “CBS This Morning” on Monday.
“You know, I don’t think that a private company should be censoring politicians or news.”
The multibillionaire Facebook founder and CEO has been under fire since hundreds of employees wrote to him last month to condemn the policy, telling their boss, “Free speech and paid speech are not the same thing.”
“Misinformation affects us all,” read the open letter signed by more than 250 Facebook employees. “Our current policies on fact-checking people in political office, or those running for office, are a threat to what FB stands for. We strongly object to this policy as it stands.”
But Zuckerberg, 35, who appeared with his wife, Priscilla Chan, wasn’t moved, telling “This Morning” host Gayle King, “I think that people should be able to judge for themselves the character of politicians.”
“A lot of people have a lot of different opinions,” he said, calling political advertising “clearly a very complex issue.”
As the United States heads into an election year, concern is growing about the outsized role of social-media giants in unchecked political advertising.
Zuckerberg’s sit-down came one day after YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki defended the video-sharing giant’s decision to remove more than 300 ads from President Trump’s re-election campaign over the summer because they “violated company policy.”
In an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes” on Sunday night, Wojcicki denied that YouTube and parent company Google were motivated by political bias.
“Our algorithms, they don’t have any concept of understanding what’s a Democrat, what’s a Republican,” she said.
The video ads paid for by Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign, Donald J. Trump for President, ran for several days on YouTube before being taken down.
When quizzed on why the ads were pulled, Wojcicki said some of videos were “not approved to run,” and directed further questions to Google’s online transparency report, which keeps an archive of political ads.
But the report gives no specific reason why the ads were taken down, saying they “violated Google’s advertising policies” and offering a laundry list of prohibited practices and content including misrepresentation, alcohol, adult content and gambling.
“There’s no transparency in the transparency report,” said “60 Minutes” anchor correspondent Lesley Stahl.