Wagner James Au / New World Notes

A majority of Facebook employees do not believe the company is responsible for preventing misinformation about the US election on its platform. That's at least according to an anonymous survey launched last week by the development team of Blind, an anonymous messaging app for tech company staffers. With about 1500 replies registered by employees across many technology companies (100 from the social network), an overwhelming majority of 68% placed the responsibility on Facebook. But only 47% of Facebook employees placed the responsibility on their own company.

While the survey sample size is small, the response is consistent with recent reports that Facebook staff are largely not responsive to election interference on its platform unless it becomes a major PR issue:

[A former employee turned whistleblower] remarked on Facebook’s habit of prioritizing public relations over real-world problems. “It’s an open secret within the civic integrity space that Facebook’s short-term decisions are largely motivated by PR and the potential for negative attention,” she wrote, noting that she was told directly at a 2020 summit that anything published in the New York Times or Washington Post would obtain elevated priority.

“It’s why I’ve seen priorities of escalations shoot up when others start threatening to go to the press, and why I was informed by a leader in my organization that my civic work was not impactful under the rationale that if the problems were meaningful they would have attracted attention, became a press fire, and convinced the company to devote more attention to the space.”

When she asked the company to do more in terms of finding and stopping malicious activity related to elections and political activity, she said she was told that “human resources are limited.” And when she was ordered to stop focusing on civic work, “I was told that Facebook would no longer have further need for my services if I refused.”

This latest survey is also consistent with a Blind survey of Facebook employees from last October, with 54% of them supporting CEO Mark Zuckerberg's policy of allowing political ads on Facebook, even if they contained false claims — even though, very notably, 51% of respondents agreed that this policy might change the 2020 election.