‘THAT WHICH WE FEAR’

Facebook Executive Warned Workers: Don’t Use Platform to Hurt Trump

Andrew Bosworth said in a recent memo that while he wants Trump to lose, employees shouldn’t tamper with Facebook to sway the election.

A Facebook executive told employees that he badly wanted Trump to lose the 2020 election but cautioned against bending Facebook from within to achieve that goal, according to a memo obtained by The New York Times.

“I find myself desperately wanting to pull any lever at my disposal to avoid the same result. So what stays my hand? I find myself thinking of the Lord of the Rings at this moment,” wrote Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, head of the company’s virtual and augmented reality division and former head of its advertising business. Bosworth said he considers himself a liberal. He warned employees that tampering with Facebook to sway the election would corrupt the company, much as the ring does in the fantasy trilogy.  “As tempting as it is to use the tools available to us to change the outcome, I am confident we must never do that or we will become that which we fear,” he said.

He touched on Facebook’s other public controversies as well, saying the company had been “late” to address misinformation, election interference, and safeguards for personal information. He stood by Facebook’s controversial policy of allowing politicians to lie in ads to the chagrin of some employees, who disagreed in the comments, according to the Times.

Bosworth wrote another controversial memo in 2016 in which he said in defense of the company that even if terrorists were to organize attacks using the company’s products, connecting people was still a net benefit.

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Blake MontgomeryFormer Reporter/Editor

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