The comments were a startling reminder of the power Facebook has attained over political discourse in the US — and the pressures it faces as the hotly contested presidential election in November 2020 enters its final weeks.
In a statement to Business Insider, a Facebook spokesperson said: "While many Republicans think we should do one thing, many Democrats think we should do the exact opposite.
"If you are a right-wing loner in a small village you can connect with other right-wing loners in other villages," says one former Facebook employee.
In the runup to the 2012 US election, Facebook was more concerned with getting politicians to create public Facebook pages on Facebook — and with the possibility that the FCC might ban political advertising on Facebook — than it was in policing the veracity of politicians' ads on the platform, a former Facebook policy team employee recalls.
In 2013, rival Twitter was still growing fast and dominating the real-time news conversation, and Facebook wanted a piece of the action.
A follow-up survey in 2019 found that 73% of Facebook's users — by then numbering almost 2.5 billion — were using it for news, and at an even greater proportion than Twitter (71%).
The WSJ reported that at an internal Facebook "town hall" meeting in January 2016, Zuckerberg said that Trump's comments were indeed hate speech — "but said the implications of removing them were too drastic.".
A delegation of prominent conservative commentators — including Glenn Beck and Heritage Foundation head Jim DeMint — were invited to Facebook's headquarters for a 90-minute closed door chat with Zuckerberg, Sandberg and Facebook board member Peter Thiel.
After the talk, Facebook gave the visitors a "deep dive" into its news operations and a tour of the campus, according to Politico.
A few months after the meeting, Facebook fired most of Trending's human curators, replacing them with automated algorithms — the result was a flood of fake news, much of it promoting right-wing narratives, as The Guardian reported at the time.
A former Facebook employee says that the decision to automate the news curation wasn't so much about conservatives versus liberals as it was about the benefits of "humans versus algorithms.".
Around the same time, Facebook offered the Trump and Clinton campaigns the use of "embeds" — Facebook staffers that would work closely with campaign workers to help them use the social network effectively.
But in the immediate aftermath of Trump's surprise victory, some critics pointed to the proliferation of fake news and misinformation on Facebook as a contributing factor in Trump's surprising win.
A Facebook spokesperson disputed this, saying that Kaplan was instead pushing for the company to have a clear policy basis for removals.
Kaplan," another article in the Journal reported. (A Facebook spokesperson said that Kaplan was again advocating for Facebook to have a clear policy basis for its decisions.).
Groups fundamentally offer ever-closer ways for like-minded individuals to connect, a former employee said.
But the two most important meetings Zuckerberg took were with the POTUS himself, when Zuckerberg met Donald Trump for the first time that fall at the White House, and in an undisclosed dinner with Trump and conservative Facebook member Peter Thiel in October that was reported by NBC News?
It's not clear what the men discussed in those meetings, but it's no secret that Trump's provocative social media posts represent a thorny content moderation challenge for companies like Facebook and Twitter.
The episode illustrated what critics view as a core problem with Facebook's policy: The Trump campaign's overt and unparalleled willingness to lie in ads means a refusal to fact-check posts by politicians disproportionately benefits him
In June, the president's campaign ran an ad that contained Nazi iconography — a red triangle used by the fascist German regime to decry political dissidents alongside a warning about "antifa." This time, Facebook decided Trump's campaign crossed a line, and it took the ad down
"Facebook tends to politicize issues or mark issues as left issues, even when they're moral issues," said Arisha Hatch, the chief of campaigns at Color of Change, a civil rights organisation that has helped organise an advertiser boycott of Facebook over its approach to hate speech
Trump's posts, it said, spread hate speech and "facilitated voter suppression."
In the years since Facebook first doubled down on news and politics, right-wing content has flourished.
A study by liberal research and advocacy group Media Matters in July analysed a week's worth of postings from more than 1,200 Facebook pages across the political spectrum, encompassing 167,000 posts that collectively garnered hundreds of millions of interactions by Facebook users.
Their findings: Right-leaning pages consistently over-indexed on engagement compared to left-leaning ones, and that "of the 10 posts with the most engagements, seven were from right-leaning pages and four of these seven were from President Donald Trump's Facebook account."
Facebook has argued that such rankings are not necessarily reflective of what most people see on Facebook — reflecting with the content that's most-engaged-with rather than what appears most frequently in users' news feeds
("Pages in these lists see high engagement because followers, or those interacting w/ the posts, are passionate. But it shouldn't be confused with what's most popular," executive John Hegeman said on Twitter.)
But it demonstrates how over the past decade, Facebook has fostered an ecosystem in which some of the most reliably engaging and conversation-generating pages are those on the right — with potentially consequential implications for the 2020 election
The response from one of Jordan's colleagues on the Democrat side of the aisle, who cited data on top-performing Facebook posts from Fox News, captured the irony of Facebook's predicament:
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