A top Meta executive admitted on live television that the majority of his company’s employees are involved in censoring speech.
While on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” Feb. 16, Meta President of Global Affairs Sir Nick Clegg proudly estimated around 40,000 Meta employees, or almost 60 percent, help silence free speech on the company’s platforms (including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp). One of the network’s employees was then caught on hot mic, giving context to Clegg’s shocking claim. Clegg also declared his company weaponizes artificial intelligence (AI) as a censorship tool, including in regard to elections, constituting blatant election interference.
The CNBC host, Sara Eisen, babbled about “disinformation, misinformation, [and] interference with the election.” She claimed that the “government should be” targeting this speech, an apparent endorsement of unconstitutional government censorship. “How many people do you have working on this issue, and how do you know what’s enough?” she pressed Clegg. But the tech executive’s response shocked even CNBC.
“We have around 40,000 people working on kind of safety and integrity,” Clegg stated, using a leftist euphemism for censoring speech. Clegg claimed Meta has spent around $20 billion, including $5 billion in the last year, to fight for alleged “election integrity.” One CNBC employee was so startled that a whisper was heard on a hot microphone at this point. “Forty thousand? They only have 67,000 employees,” a seemingly stunned voice can be heard commenting.
Based on Clegg’s comment, nearly 60 percent of Meta’s total workforce is involved in censoring free speech, likely using a leftist bias. Clegg, meanwhile, boasted about how his company uses AI to crush speech. AI is “our most powerful tool to identify and deal with the kind of content we don’t want to see on our platforms,” Clegg said. This includes “hate speech,” he added, using a vague term that can mean anything that the left does not agree with. Clegg asserted that hate speech has “been reduced by over 50 percent” in recent years through “improvements in AI technology.”
While AI has its risks, Clegg concluded, “it’s ironically also the same technology that helps … established players from making sure that their … policies are being properly respected and enforced.”
Meta has censored content on its platforms repeatedly based on federal government demands, for instance crushing the Hunter Biden laptop scandal in 2020 after FBI priming. A Media Research Center poll found in November 2020 that 17 percent of then-presidential candidate Joe Biden’s voters would not have voted for him had they been aware of the president’s scandals that Big Tech and the legacy media censored. Yet Meta’s Oversight Board members recently advocated for increased censorship.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact Facebook headquarters at (650) 308-7300 and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on “misinformation” and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
