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Facebook opposed promoting information in Spanish about the 2020 US elections.

2021-10-25T21:13:27.877Z


More revelations from the Facebook Papers reveal that Mark Zuckerberg refused a campaign to motivate Spanish-speakers to register and vote in the presidential elections.


Before the 2020 presidential elections in the United States, Facebook created a voting information center that was intended to motivate people to register.

The WhatsApp team, owned by the company, wanted to emulate the idea and promote information in Spanish

on this platform.

But Mark Zuckerberg refused. 

This is one of the revelations of the leaked Facebook documents, in which employees of the social media giant denounce that the company amplifies violent groups and has no interest in eliminating hate speech. 

The documents were obtained and reviewed by a consortium of news organizations, including NBC News, the sister network of Noticias Telemundo.

The idea of ​​the WhatsApp executives was to generate an automatic chat to answer the questions of Hispanic voters

or to attach a link that would direct them to this information.  

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But Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook, raised objections to the idea, saying it was not "politically neutral" or could make the company appear partisan, according to a person familiar with the project who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal issues and documents. reviewed by The Washington Post. 

Despite the refusal, a shortened version of the campaign was implemented, an association with external groups that allowed Hispanic WhatsApp users to send a message to a chat if they saw possible misinformation or send a message to the Vote.org organization to get information about the elections.

The decision is not minor as employees say that even though the company is now a conglomerate, Zuckerberg influences product and policy decisions to accommodate their personal values, sometimes bypassing the personal safety of billions of dollars. users, according to employees who spoke to The Washington Post.

Facebook Co-Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg shortly before testifying before the Congressional House of Representatives Financial Services Committee on October 23, 2019.Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images file

This is not the first time that Zuckerberg has been questioned on the subject.

Last year, it declared in Congress that the company removes 94% of hateful information,

but internal documents show that its researchers estimated that the company removes less than 5 percent of this content.

The files were included in the disclosures made to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and were delivered to Congress by Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee who leaked inside information.

In his testimony before Congress, Haugen repeatedly accused Zuckerberg of choosing the growth of the company over the public good.

"The company intentionally withholds vital information from the public, the United States Government, and around the world," he told the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Protection.



Source: telemundo

All news articles on 2021-10-25

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