Is Facebook censoring of Conservatives going to help swing the election for Democrats?

 After Mark Zuckerberg publicly denounced Donald Trump (not by name, for some reason, but very clearly), Gizmodo reported that Facebook employees asked on an internal message board whether Facebook has a responsibility to try to stop a Trump presidency. The question, verbatim, was: “What responsibility does Facebook have to help prevent President Trump in 2017?”



Zuckerberg didn’t answer — publicly, at least. But there was a larger, and frankly scarier, question lurking behind the question of Facebook’s political responsibilities: Could Facebook help prevent President Trump? Not through lobbying or donations or political action committees, but simply by exploiting the enormous reach and power of its core products? Could Facebook, a private corporation with over a billion active users, swing an election just by adjusting its News Feed?



“The way that you present information on Facebook or other social-media sites can have subtle but meaningful effects on people’s moods, their attitudes,” says Paul Brewer, a professor in the communications department of the University of Delaware who has studied Facebook’s political effects. Facebook knows this better than anyone; a study, released in 2014, was conducted to see whether changing the emotional content of users’ News Feeds would affect their mood. (The answer: yes.)



The first thing Facebook would have to do, if it wanted to swing an election, would be to suss out exactly who to target.