Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, has admitted that Facebook is not a neutral platform and has its political biases. The admission comes at a time when there is a growing consensus that Facebook and other tech giants removed Donald Trump from their platforms based on their personal political biases. Instagram is owned by Facebook.
In response to a tweet that claimed that Facebook was undermined by its penchant towards appearing neutral, the head of Instagram said, “We’re not neutral. No platform is neutral, we all have values and those values influence the decisions we make. We try and be apolitical, but that’s increasingly difficult, particularly in the US where people are more and more polarized.”
The discussion occurred over an announcement by Facebook Vice-President Nick Clegg that civil rights attorney Roy L. Austin Jr. had been appointed as the first VP of Civil Rights at the company. Austin has previously worked for the Obama administration. Clegg said that Austin will establish Facebook’s new civil rights team.
The honest admission comes at a time when tech giants are engaging in censorship of Donald Trump and his aides, including his supporters. Amazon, Google and Apple together pushed Parler, an alternative social media platform committed to Freedom of Speech offline, after Donald Trump opened an account there after being banned from everywhere else.
Tech giants have been trying hard to maintain the pretense that such extravagant censorship measures were necessitated by the recent riots at Capitol Hill but the consensus is that it has gone too far. And now, after the admission by Adam Mosseri, it will become even harder to deny that the actions were motivated by personal political biases since all these platforms did absolutely nothing when left-wing mobs were burning down businesses and prominent individuals in the mainstream media and Democrat party were instigating the mob and justifying the riots.
