Conservative Facebook employees create a group to complain about ‘political monoculture’

Gareth McHugh
Sep 2, 2018 · 2 min read

Should large social media companies such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook remain politically unbiased in the current political climate? This single question has a large impact on our culture and social media. Social media companies have the ability to influence millions based on what they feature and post to their accounts. Conservative Facebook employees addressed this head on recently when they joined together online to protest Facebook’s supposed left-leaning politics. In the article written by Johnny Lieu on Mashable, it’s discussed how the group wanted to essentially voice their concerns that the company was ignoring or rejecting any ideas that went against the liberal point of mind.

Whether or not this group’s claim is true, this discussion of politics and social media is extremely important to have. Politics takes up a huge portion of our everyday news and has since the founding of the country. Facebook has even addressed the problem with political news recently with the presidential election of 2016. During the election untruthful and misleading news from both sides of the political spectrum, and even international influencers, caused a huge disturbance on the site. To combat this Facebook started shifting through and blocking these “fake news” stories. If this conservative group becomes larger and more impactful, I could see Facebook making similar changes. Perhaps, Facebook would create a way to balance out what they feature on their site so both liberal and conservative ideologies are presented fairly. Moreover, Facebook could perhaps hire more people from different political backgrounds in order to get opinions from both sides of the aisle. It’s important for Facebook to maintain a somewhat unbiased position in politics just because of their subscriber base.

Facebook users consist of people of all political ideologies and backgrounds; thus, favoring one Ideology over the others could cause a loss of subscribers. Furthermore, deliberately favoring one political party and then showcasing articles backing that party seems unethical. This would just create a sound chamber and lead to closed mindedness, which is the last thing needed in current times. From a business perspective, Facebook should also remain as unbiased as possible. Recently, Facebook has been trying to create the image that they are a respectable news source and can be trusted. Articles like this are undermining that belief and could cause distrust among Facebooks users. This distrust would cause users to utilize Facebook less for news and instead turn to more conventional news sources. This potential loss of users is exactly what Facebook is always trying to avoid which is why Facebook might potentially enact new polices to appease this growing conservative employee group.

Link to Source: https://mashable.com/article/facebook-conservative-political-diversity/#SeAggnysYsqg