Facebook Heavily Biased Toward Hillary Clinton? WikiLeaks Latest Reveal Shows Possible Direct Correlation
In one email exchange, dated June 6th, 2015, Sandberg expresses her desire for Clinton to become president, writing to Podesta, “And I still want HRC to win badly. I am still here to help as I can.” While that was a private exchange, Sandberg also made her zest for seeing Clinton as the 45th President of the United States publicly known in a Facebook post on July 28th of this year.
Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook COO to Clinton campaign chief John Podesta, June 6, 2015
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) October 25, 2016
1: https://t.co/qUo2pXTyB7
2: https://t.co/o6pXZFXVyy pic.twitter.com/Jcwn0gIgOF
“My support for Hillary is not because she is a woman. It is because she is the most qualified candidate—and she is the leader we need,” wrote Sandberg. “We need a leader whose policies reflect where we’re going, not where we’ve been.
“History is not a movie that plays out before us; it is the result of choices we make. And this year, our choice is clear.”
None of that is too shocking when you think about it. Sandberg has every right to endorse whichever candidate she wants for president. However, a later exchange between Sandberg and Podesta showed that Mark Zuckerberg was looking to get in on the action a bit, and perhaps curry favor with Podesta and the Clinton camp in shaping public policy.
Sandberg wrote on August 3rd, 2015:
Mark is meeting with people to learn more about next steps for his philanthropy and social action and it’s hard to imagine someone better placed or more experienced than you to help him…
He’s begun to think about whether/how he might want to shape advocacy efforts to support his philanthropic priorities and is particularly interested in meeting people who could help him understand how to move the needle on the specific public policy issues he cares most about. He wants to meet folks who can inform his understanding about effective political operations to advance public policy goals on social oriented objectives (like immigration, education or basic scientific research).
Donald Trump has long claimed that Clinton is too cozy with big businesses, and one cannot dismiss the fact that Facebook has a global user base of 1.7 billion users. When you toss in the fact that Facebook came under fire earlier this year for allegedly suppressing conservative news outlets in the Trending News bar, questions begin to arise about Facebook’s impartiality in the political race.
Although Facebook denied these allegations (Zuckerberg even addressed the matter personally), the company fired its human editorial staff that was previously in charge of managing Trending News topics and instead put in its place a recently error-prone AI-based system that often can’t seem to tell a factual story from a hoax.
@wikileaks it's called sorcery pic.twitter.com/VTj22d7fXY
— foxfire (@foxfire2112) October 25, 2016
It’s also being reported that if Clinton actually wins the race for the White House, Sandberg is at the top of list when it comes to picks for Treasury Secretary. However, many in the progressive wing of the Democratic party are skeptical of Sandberg being tapped for the position. “She's a proxy for this growing problem that is the hegemony of five to ten major Silicon Valley platforms," said David Segal, executive director for Demand Progress, in an interview with Politico.
“If a senior Cabinet member is from Facebook, at worst it could directly interfere” with antitrust actions, said Lina Khan, a fellow at the New America think tank. “But even in the best of cases there's a real worry that it will have a chilling effect on good-faith antitrust efforts to scrutinize potential anti-competitive implications of dominant tech platforms.”
For her part, of course Sandberg notes that she is perfectly happy in her current position at Facebook.
