Employees of the most popular social network lean left — so much so that they’ve given far more to Democrats than Republicans. This election cycle Facebook employees donated more than 6 times more money to Democrats as to Republicans.
With less than a week to go until the election, Republicans got $115,000 from Facebook employees while Democrats got $733,426, according to OpenSecrets data. At least 344 Facebook employees donated to political campaigns during the 2016 election: 318 or 92 percent gave to Democrats and liberal PACs, while only 25 or 7 percent donated to Republicans, and one donated $350 to Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson.
Facebook president Mark Zuckerberg personally gave $10,000 to the San Francisco Democratic Central Committee (SFDCC) in October 2015. SFDCC is the official organization of Democrats in California, and handles voter registration and outreach, endorsements, and fundraising.
Facebook co-founder Dustin Moscovitz launched himself into politics in September 2016 with a first-time donation of $20 million to pro-Clinton PACs, despite having “reservations about anyone using large amounts of money to influence elections.”
Moscovitz, who is no longer with Facebook, announced in October that he would give another $15 million to Clinton’s cause, bringing his total 2016 election spending to $35 million thus far.
On April 9, former Facebook employees told Gizmodo that the site “routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers.”
In that article, Gizmodo editor Michael Nunez observed that, based on his interviews, the social media behemoth acted not as an open marketplace for content but instead like “a traditional newsroom, reflecting the biases of its workers and the institutional imperatives of the corporation.”
Donation data showed just what the “biases of its workers” were.
After the report, Facebook met with conservatives including Media Research Center President Brent Bozell to address the bias, while the broadcast networks largely ignored the story. While Facebook pledged to pursue a more unbiased “trending” section after the meeting, employee donations still show a distinct left-wing tilt on the part of its staff.
