Cowed Facebook To Force Political Training On Employees

Facebook has been receiving criticisms recently for its alleged bias against topics that have conservative themes by suppressing them from their list of trending subjects. Even though no proof of any such political bias has been found, it seems Mark Zuckerberg is taking the threat of losing conservative users to heart. As a result, Facebook employees will be required to undergo political bias training in order to supposedly root out individuals who will not tow the company line in favor of their principles.

The announcement was made by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg during the American Enterprise Institute, which The Hill covered.

"We think a lot about diversity at Facebook," Sandberg said. "And we have a managing-bias class that all of our leaders and a lot of our employees have taken that I was part of helping to create, and we've focused on racial bias, age bias, gender bias, national bias, and we're going to add in a scenario now on political bias."

The Hill also received information from a Facebook insider that the training was mandatory for all employees on all levels. Along with all the other sweeping changes that the social network has put in place in order to address the supposed bias of their employees, it’s clear that Facebook wants to push the appearance of diversity as much as possible.

However, as PC Mag points out, this could be quite challenging for the social media company. For one thing, those working in the tech industry tend to be largely liberal in political affiliation. Most of the big-name bosses of tech companies are endorsing Hillary Clinton, while Donald Trump only has Peter Thiel as an ally.

Considering the nature of the people that it intends to hire, Facebook’s expectation that there will be no political bias among its employees is a tall order indeed.