A majority of Facebook employees believe the company's policy of allowing false statements in political ads posted to the social network may change the outcome of the 2020 election. That's at least according to an anonymous survey launched last weekend by the development team of Blind, an anonymous messaging app for tech company staffers.
The results are above, with 51% of Facebook employees who took the survey answering Yes to the question, "Do you think Facebook's policy to allow political ads with false claims may change the 2020 election?" Many more respondents from other major tech companies thought that election interference was likely -- with 78% of Apple employees answering Yes, at the high end.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made a widely-covered speech last week, defending this policy on free expression principles. However, according to this same Blind survey, his employees are almost evenly split on the matter:
Asked, "Do you support Mark Zuckerberg's policy of allowing political ads on Facebook, even if the ads contain claims that can be proven false?", only 54% of Facebook employees who took the Blind survey answered Yes. Few employees from other major tech companies who took the same survey support Zuckerberg's policy, with only 22% of Google staffers answering in the affirmative, on the low end.
Facebook has over 16,000 registered users with the service, a Blind representative tells me, 186 of whom opted to take this survey. Of course, the small sample size deserves a major caveat (there are over 39,000 total Facebook employees), as does the nature of the survey collection. (Blind is an opt-in third party app that requires a company e-mail address, for sign-up.) At minimum, however, we can safely conclude that there is significant concern among Facebook staffers that false political ads will shape the 2020 election -- and significant dissatisfaction, over Zuckerberg's defense of the policy.
Notably, by contrast, in a similar Blind survey, most Blizzard employees support the company's censorship of users around sensitive Chinese topics.
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