Another day, another Facebook response to biasgate.
Facebook says some of its best friends are conservatives
It even hires them!
Photo by David Ramos/Getty Images
Peter Kafka covered media and technology, and their intersection, at Vox. Many of his stories can be found in his Kafka on Media newsletter, and he also hosts the Recode Media podcast.
This one comes from Facebook’s public policy head Joel Kaplan, who identifies himself as “a Republican and a conservative” and then spends more than 700 words explaining why the social network is a great place for conservatives to express themselves.
Republican presidential candidates spend lots of time on Facebook, Kaplan notes, and so do other right-leaning politicians and political figures, from Paul Ryan to Glenn Beck. He also points out that Facebook will sponsor the GOP convention this summer.
”Similarly, over the last few years we have sponsored or sent Facebook representatives to numerous gatherings of conservatives — like RightOnline, Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Lincoln Initiative, Americans for Prosperity, RedState and the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) — so that we can help show the most active conservative speakers and leaders how to make their voices heard on our platform,” Kaplan writes.
“I love the fact that conservative voices are so strong on Facebook — and that we are the place where the political debate takes place,” Kaplan writes, while arguing, again, that the company doesn’t have a policy of suppressing conservatives — contrary to accusations that surfaced Monday via a Gizmodo story.
The post comes a couple days after Mark Zuckerberg announced that he would like to talk to conservatives, to convince them of the same thing. Which seems to indicate that Facebook thinks this story isn’t going to go away anytime soon.
It’s also a reminder of the fact that Facebook has made a concerted effort to hire Republicans and conservatives like Kaplan — not to stave off charges of bias, but to help it navigate Washington and the general political landscape.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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