Working for Facebook may be awkward for anyone to the right of President Biden, as evidenced by the latest Project Veritas video release.
The undercover journalism outfit posted late Sunday two of the tech giant’s weekly Q&A videos between the top leadership and staff, leaked by an unnamed “Facebook insider,” that show CEO Mark Zuckerberg denouncing former President Trump and heralding Mr. Biden’s first week on the job.
“In his first day, President Biden already issued a number of executive orders on areas that we as a company care quite deeply about and have for some time,” Mr. Zuckerberg said in the Jan. 21 video.
Mr. Biden’s orders included those canceling the Keystone XL pipeline, reentering the Paris climate accord and reinstating the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals order on illegal immigration.
“Areas like immigration, preserving DACA, ending restrictions on travel from Muslim-majority countries, as well as other executive orders on climate and advancing racial justice and equity,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. “I think these were all important and positive steps.”
He said he looked forward to working with the Biden administration “on some of their top priorities, starting with the Covid response.”
Few would be surprised to learn that Mr. Zuckerberg is a Biden fan, given the platform’s moves shutting down Republican and conservative campaign ads in 2020, as well as its decision to kick Mr. Trump off Facebook and Instagram indefinitely following the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol Hill rioting.
“It’s so important that our political leaders lead by example, make sure we put the nation first here, and what we’ve seen is that the president [Trump] has been doing the opposite of that,” Mr. Zuckerberg said in the Jan. 7 video.
FACEBOOK INSIDER LEAKS: Zuck/FB Execs Admit FB has “too much power”
— James O’Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) February 1, 2021
HOURS OF VIDEO!
FB wants to “work … with [Biden] on some of their top priorities”
“Biden already issued a number of exec orders on areas that we as a company really care quite deeply about”#ExposeFacebook pic.twitter.com/KNd0BU7biP
He accused Mr. Trump of “trying to use our platform and others to incite a violent insurrection against a democratically elected government.”
The ability to remove unwelcome speech gives Facebook and the other tech giants enormous sway over public discourse, and even Nick Clegg, vice president of global affairs, said he worried that Facebook had “too much power.”
“There has been quite a lot of disquiet expressed by many leaders around the world, from the President of Mexico to Alexei Navalny in Russia to Chancellor Angela Merkel and others saying, ‘Well this shows that private companies have got too much power, and they should be only making these decisions in a way that is framed by democratically agreed rules,’” Mr. Clegg said in the Jan. 21 video.
He continued: “We agree with that. Mark has been very clear about that, that ideally we wouldn’t be taking these decisions on our own, we would be taking these decisions in line with and in conformity with democratically agreed rules and principles. At the moment, those democratically agreed rules don’t exist.”
Guy Rosen, vice president of integrity, discussed how the platform targets and eliminates “hate speech.”
“We have a system that is able to freeze commenting on threads in cases where our systems are detecting that there may be a thread that has hate speech or violence,” Mr. Rosen said. “These are all things we’ve built over the past three, four years as part of our investments into the integrity space, our efforts to protect elections.”
Roy Austin, who holds the newly created position of Facebook vice president of civil rights, said that he wanted “every major decision to run through a civil rights lens.”
“I wonder whether or not we can use Oculus to help a White police officer to understand what it feels like to be a young Black man who’s stopped and searched and arrested by the police,” Mr. Austin said.
Facebook had no immediate public comment on the video release.
“Not only is our source still on the inside of Facebook … we still have more,” said Project Veritas, which dubbed its latest investigation #ExposeZuck.
• Valerie Richardson can be reached at vrichardson@washingtontimes.com.
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