title:  Facebook Employees Asked Mark Zuckerberg If They Have A ‘Responsibility’ To Stop Trump
text: Earlier this week, Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, long may he reign, praise be his name, holy is he, we bow down before him, subtly denounced racist, xenophobic hatemonger, Donald Trump, during a keynote speech at the company s annual F8 conference. While he never mentioned Trump by name, the tech god had plenty to say about Trump s nature. As I look around the world, I m starting to see people and nations turning inward, against the idea of a connected world and a global community,  Zuckerberg told the crowd. But then he targeted his verbal beatdown to Trump: I hear fearful voices talking about building walls  It takes courage to choose hope over fear. Instead of building walls we can help build bridges. Instead of dividing people we can connect people. We do it one person at a time, one connection at time. That s why I think the work we re doing together is more important than it has ever been before. Trump, and his moronic horde of jaded, hateful Teanuts, have all said these things, and worse. It takes courage to choose hope over fear,  Zuckerberg added.  People will always call you naive but it s this hope and optimism that s behind every important step forward. Zuckerberg s powerful words obviously struck a chord with employees, who voted to ask their CEO a very important question in a recent weekly Q+A: Do they have a moral obligation to stop Trump from rising to power? Gizmodo reports:Every week, Facebook employees vote in an internal poll on what they want to ask Zuckerberg in an upcoming Q&A session. A question from the March 4 poll was:  What responsibility does Facebook have to help prevent President Trump in 2017? A screenshot of the poll, given to Gizmodo, shows the question as the fifth most popular.It s not particularly surprising the question was asked, or that some Facebook employees are anti-Trump. The question and Zuckerberg s statements on Tuesday align with the consensus politics of Silicon Valley: pro-immigration, pro-trade, pro-expansion of the internet.This question could mean many things, depending on the level and nature of  help.  In the 2010 congressional elections, Facebook used its considerable influence to convince voters to show up at the polls. An estimated 340,000 extra people vote (unfortunately, not many of them were Democrats, who largely stayed home rather than perform their civic duty. Hint, hint, guys) thanks to an aggressive, one-day campaign that strong-armed users into getting off the couch to head to the polls. Could Facebook wage a similar war on Trump by utilizing a similar strategy to inform conservatives that he s the only man in recent history who chances being unfavorably compared to Hitler one day? Would such a thing be ethical, no matter the motivating reason?In 2014, the social media giant experimented with manipulating users  emotions. In a move that was widely decried by everyone the company removed either all positive or all negative posts from a good number of its users  news feeds in an effort to see how it would affect their emotions. Technically, we have all agreed to this sort of thing when we agreed to the data use policy, but no one was warned that they were part of the experiment, either. The result was as one would expect: more negative posts caused people to produce more negative posts. More positive led to more positive posts from users, and so on.Could the same be done with posts about Trump? Would showing people more negative Trump posts cause the overall sentiment   even among the most vapid who reside in Stupidville   toward Trump to shift? Could they use this method to influence voters? Once again, would it be ethical, even if it would accomplish something good? Gizmodo notes:What s exceedingly important about this question being raised and Zuckerberg s answer, if there is one is how Facebook now treats the powerful place it holds in the world. It s unprecedented. More than 1.04 billion people use Facebook. It s where we get our news, share our political views, and interact with politicians. It s also where those politicians are spending a greater share of their budgets.And Facebook has no legal responsibility to give an unfiltered view of what s happening on their network. Facebook can promote or block any material that it wants,  UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh told the publication.  Facebook has the same First Amendment right as the New York Times. They can completely block Trump if they want. They block him or promote him. Volokh says that the only way Facebook could legally overstep would be to collude with any candidate. If they were to choose to stamp out positive Trump posts, to create a blackout, they would have every legal right. If they were working with Sanders or Clinton, however, it would be a different issue: If Facebook was actively coordinating with the Sanders or Clinton campaign, and suppressing Donald Trump news, it would turn an independent expenditure (protected by the First Amendment) into a campaign contribution because it would be coordinated and that could be restricted.But if they re just saying,  We don t want Trump material on our site,  they have every right to do that. It s protected by the First Amendment. It is very clear that Facebook could take a number of actions to ensure that Trump stays as far from the White House as his fans are from reality. But, what if Zuckerberg decides the company does have a moral obligation? Unfortunately, given the secretive nature of the news feed (and their history of manipulating users), we likely won t know what, if anything, he would decide to do   at least not until after it has happened.Featured image via Getty Images