New figures show Facebook employees have donated almost seven times as much to Democrats as they have to Republicans, as the social network comes under pressure to prove it is not biased against conservatives.
Since the social network was founded in 2004, employees have made 87 per cent of their political contributions to Democrats and progressive causes, including the presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, as well as current Democratic senators Kamala Harris and Cory Booker.
Just 13 per cent of employees’ donations went to Republicans, according to an analysis by GovPredict, a political analytics company.
The figures showed Facebook employees donated just over $5,000 to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, less than they gave to California state senator Scott Wiener, Oregon state senator Bill Hansell and San Francisco’s new mayor London Breed — all Democrats.
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Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor and presidential candidate, was the biggest Republican recipient of donations from Facebook employees, with more than $50,000 in contributions.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and chief executive, made the single largest political donation of any of the company’s employees, giving $1m to FWD.US, a pro-immigration tech lobbying group.
Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, gave more than $400,000 to the Hillary Victory Fund — a fundraising vehicle for Mrs Clinton’s presidential campaign, as well as the Democratic National Committee — while Kevin Systrom, the Instagram co-founder who recently left the company, donated $100,000 to the same fund.
Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s vice-president of global policy, the former deputy chief of staff for George Bush, is by the far the most prominent Republican at the company. Mr Kaplan is responsible for more than a quarter of Facebook employees’ contributions to Republican state candidates.
Mr Kaplan attracted criticism from Facebook employees earlier this month after he attended the nomination hearing for his friend Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanagh. Facebook said at the time its leadership team had “made mistakes” in handling the event and “was grateful for the feedback” from employees.
According to GovPredict, donations from employees at other Big Tech companies have also skewed heavily towards the Democrats in recent years. Staff at Alphabet, Google’s parent company, have given more than 90 per cent of their donations to Democrats and Democratic causes since 2004.
Facebook has been quizzed by Congressional Republicans in recent years over its decisions to remove conservative-leaning content. Earlier this year, the company brought in former Republican Senator Jon Kyl and his team at law firm Covington and Burling to investigate whether the company was discriminating against rightwing views. Senator Kyl has yet to publicly report his findings.
The concerns date back to before the 2016 US presidential election, when a former employee on the company’s Trending Topics section claimed that conservative headlines were not promoted, even if they were trending. Facebook dropped human moderators for the section to rely on algorithms, and later shut down Trending Topics completely.
Facebook did not comment on the GovPredict figures. But its website says it supports campaigns of candidates “who are our vision of an open and connected world and a culture of innovation”.
“The private political preferences of Facebook executives, directors, and employees do not influence either FBPAC [Facebook’s political action committee] or the company’s political contributions.”
