Facebook came under heavy fire after it was speculated that the platform had been exploited by Cambridge Analytica for allegedly helping Donald Trump win the 2016 US presidential elections. Mark Zuckerberg appeared before U.S. senate, trying to justify his company’s intentions and hoping to clean its slate. Things however, do not seem to end there.
An executive from his own company has recently shared his opinions on the matter, which by cover looks like it could invalidate Mark’s whole testimony.
Facebook’s executive Andrew Bosworth — one of the most vocal employees at the company — shared a memo publicly, in which he said that Facebook was responsible for Trump getting the presidency in 2016 and urged the company to not use its power to stop his election this time around.
In the memo, he shared his “thoughts of 2020” with his employees in which he admitted to Facebook being the reason Trump came into power. However, he explains that it isn’t as straightforward as it sounds. He wrote that while the accusations are partially true, he does not believe that Russian interference and Cambridge Analytica scandal had a huge part to play.
According to Andrew, though Facebook did play a huge role in President Trump getting to the White House, it isn’t for any of the ‘scandalous’ reasons that people suspect. He holds Facebook accountable, for he thinks that Trump had the best “digital ad campaign” that he had ever seen and that is what secured him the win.
He goes on to make the most nerd-like reference to Lord Of The Rings in which he says that Facebook should not use its enormous reach to inhibit Trump’s re election in 2020, comparing it to characters in the novel being tempted to use the Power Ring to defeat evil. He says that while it is tempting, the company should keep itself away from such actions, or they would “end up becoming what we fear”.
He also clarified that he is not an avid Trump supporter by any stretch of the word, but he thinks that doing a task as heinous as shifting public opinion to suit his personal agendas would be preposterous and unfair to Facebook’s users.
