Facebook CEO and completely-normal-humanoid Mark Zuckerberg testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee today that Facebook has removed 150 million posts, ads, and other content related to the 2020 election.
(A shot of Zuckerberg's testimony to the Senate)
It's okay, though guys, because Zuck has assured us that everything that was removed went through independent third-party fAcT-cHecKeRs who totally have no bias and don't want to censor conservative voices at all!
"We partnered with election officials to remove false claims about polling conditions and displayed warnings on more than 150 million pieces of content after review by our independent third-party fact-checkers," Zuckerberg said in his prepared remarks. "We put in place strong voter suppression policies prohibiting explicit or implicit misrepresentations about how or when to vote as well as attempts to use threats related to COVID-19 to scare people into not voting."
Ah, see? Facebook is one of the good guys. They're just looking out for little people like you and me, trying to protect us from mean internet trolls... and, you know, people who disagree with the tech giant on any given topic.
It's not like Facebook is insanely partisan, with 90% of political donations going to Democrats. It's not like they participated in a DELUGE of censorship against the Trump campaign without censoring anything from Sleepy Joe. It's also not like a former Facebook employee said he's willing to testify before Congress that 75-80% of all content removed is from conservative sources. I mean, could you IMAGINE if that was verified by undercover video of content moderators saying "I don't give no f--ks, I'll delete it," or "If someone is wearing a MAGA hat, I am going to delete them for terrorism" in response to how they handle conservative content.
If such things happened, you'd think you'd see a massive migration of people to alternative social platforms.
It'd be unthinkable that they'd block hashtags around election fraud allegations, remove Christian ministries from their site, attempt to block information that might incriminate our potential next president and his son as international criminals, prohibit speaking against "gender identity," reduce the distribution of pro-life groups, or allow the Communist Party of China to run ads against freedom-loving protestors in Hong Kong while censoring conservative Americans.
[Takes Breath]
I definitely know that Facebook always has our best interests at heart and doesn't track us even if we opt out of location sharing. And they would never activate our phone cameras to spy on us. I've never even heard anyone say that their "surveillance-based business model" amounts to "human rights abuse."
It's not like Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) confronted Zuckerberg directly about the ways Facebook can track you across the entire web.
I'm sure Sen. Hawley is wrong though. Facebook only has our best interests, not their own, at heart.
As a bonus, here's a young Zuckerberg in 2005 talking about why the site was growing so fast in popularity – because it was a place where people could feel comfortable sharing information they might not otherwise share online. I'm glad the site has TOTALLY stayed true to those roots!
