I think Facebook is in kind of a sticky situation since their recommendations algorithms function similarly to a newspaper picking which stories to run. So on the one hand, if this story turns out to be garbage, they don’t have any obligation to be promoting it to their 2 billion users. But also, I’m pretty sure that hasn’t been established yet—someone at Facebook merely thinks it might be garbage, possibly because of their pre-existing views of the people involved. I think their concern is that, if a story is possibly garbage but takes time to fact-check, then there’s no way to avoid promoting garbage stories to people while waiting for the fact-check to be completed (perhaps “fact-check” should be in quotes here, the fact-checkers also have opinions of their own).

The thing that bothers me is this doesn’t seem more obviously garbage or likely to be garbage than a lot of other stories that I don’t think got the same treatment, and they’re choosing a very partisan story to start applying this precedent to.

Also, disturbingly, looking at Andy Stone’s employment history:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/andy-stone-7575b34a

we see employers such as:

- John Kerry for President

- Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee

- U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer

- House Majority PAC (at a time when the House was controlled by Democrats); this was his job immediately prior to Facebook

Stone’s listed title at Facebook is “Policy Communications Director” so presumably he’s just communicating the policy rather than actually setting it, but not only does he have political opinions of his own (which is essentially impossible to avoid), he has an extensive history of engaging in partisan political activism for a living.