A Facebook executive told staffers that the social media giant was responsible for getting President Trump elected because of the strength of his digital ad campaign – and said the company has a moral duty not to tilt the scales against him as he seeks a new term, according to a report.
Andrew Bosworth, head of the virtual and augmented reality division, wrote on his internal Facebook page on Dec. 30 that, as a liberal, he found himself wanting to use Facebook’s powerful platform against Trump, reported The New York Times, which first obtained the 2,500-word memo.
But citing the “Lord of the Rings” and the philosopher John Rawls, Bosworth said that doing so would ultimately backfire.
“I find myself desperately wanting to pull any lever at my disposal to avoid the same result,” he wrote. “So what stays my hand? I find myself thinking of the Lord of the Rings at this moment.
“Specifically when Frodo offers the ring to Galadrial and she imagines using the power righteously, at first, but knows it will eventually corrupt her,” he said, misspelling the name of the franchise’s Galadriel character.
“As tempting as it is to use the tools available to us to change the outcome, I am confident we must never do that or we will become that which we fear,” he continued in the post titled “Thoughts for 2020.”
In the meandering memo, Bosworth expounds on a slew of topics including Trump, Russian interference in the 2016 election and Cambridge Analytica, the company that improperly accessed the data of 87 million Facebook users and used it to target ads for Trump.
Bosworth said he believed Facebook did tip the 2016 election to Trump, but not because of Russian interference or misinformation – but because his campaign used Facebook’s advertising tools better than anyone else had.
“He got elected because he ran the single best digital ad campaign I’ve ever seen from any advertiser. Period,” Bosworth wrote.
“Trump just did unbelievable work. They weren’t running misinformation or hoaxes. They weren’t microtargeting or saying different things to different people. They just used the tools we had to show the right creative to each person,” he said.
“To be clear, I’m no fan of Trump. I donated the max to Hillary. After his election I wrote a post about Trump supporters that I’m told caused colleagues who had supported him to feel unsafe around me (I regret that post and deleted shortly after),” Bosworth added.
He also provided a frank assessment of Facebook’s recent shortcomings, saying it had been “late” to address the issues of data security, misinformation and foreign interference.
And he accused the left of overreach, saying that when it came to referring to people as Nazis, “I think my fellow liberals are a bit too, well, liberal.”
The post by Bosworth — the former head of the platform’s advertising team — provides an insider’s view of the debates raging inside the company about its responsibilities as it heads into this year’s election, including whether it should change its rules governing political speech.
Posts by politicians are exempt from many of Facebook’s rules, and their ads are not submitted for fact-checking.
Bosworth wrote that even though keeping Facebook’s policies in place “very well may lead to” the president’s re-election, it was the right decision.
On Tuesday, Bosworth shared his original post and wrote in an update that he had not written it “for public consumption and I am worried about context collapse so I wanted to share some important context for those who are curious.
“We have a culture at Facebook of sharing ideas and inviting discussion internally. This post had dozens of comments challenging some of my statements and exploring the implication of others,” he continued.
“I don’t think it appropriate to expose my colleagues’ internal musings to the same scrutiny as I will receive but several of those comment threads changed my views and I thought it was a very healthy back and forth,” he added.