Not all leftists are dishonest: Andrew Bosworth Facebook executive edition

A species that appears to be facing extinction in America is the honest leftist.

However a recent siting has occurred in of all places Facebook.

Andrew Bosworth a Facebook executive close to Mark Zuckerberg stated that while he's a hard core liberal, read leftist, who hates Trump he doesn't think that Facebook should use its power to stop Trump in 2020.

You can read his entire statement here, it was originally intended for internal circulation at FB but once the New York Times published parts of it Bosworth released the whole thing.

He was running the ads division of FB during the 2016 election and he states what everyone knew, the Russians $100,000 worth of ads didn't have any impact given that the candidates were spending orders of magnitude more money.

His synopsis of the whole Russian interference story:

So most of the information floating around that is widely believed isn’t accurate. But who cares? It is certainly true that we should have been more mindful of the role both paid and organic content played in democracy and been more protective of it. On foreign interference, Facebook has made material progress and while we may never be able to fully eliminate it I don’t expect it to be a major issue for 2020.

This took a lot of guts for someone who hates Trump to write so we need to give him kudos for supporting the principle that free speech is all noncriminal speech not just the speech we like.

Here's Bosworth's take on how FB helped Trump win in 2016:

So was Facebook responsible for Donald Trump getting elected? I think the answer is yes, but not for the reasons anyone thinks. He didn’t get elected because of Russia or misinformation or Cambridge Analytica. He got elected because he ran the single best digital ad campaign I’ve ever seen from any advertiser. Period.

To be clear, I’m no fan of Trump. I donated the max to Hillary. After his election I wrote a post about Trump supporters that I’m told caused colleagues who had supported him to feel unsafe around me (I regret that post and deleted shortly after).

But Parscale and Trump just did unbelievable work. They weren’t running misinformation or hoaxes. They weren’t microtargeting or saying different things to different people. They just used the tools we had to show the right creative to each person. The use of custom audiences, video, ecommerce, and fresh creative remains the high water mark of digital ad campaigns in my opinion.

Clearly Bosworth is willing to admit that despite his serious dislike for Trump Trump's campaign won not by cheating but by being good. He's probably wrong that FB won the election for Trump; it's unclear that the blue collar workers in the swing states that Trump won are big FB users.  But he's right that Trump's campaign did a great job.  Something that few Democrats would admit about the "Great Satan".

But even better Bosworth then goes on to talk about how while misusing the power of FB to advance his political cause is tempting it's not right because it will inevitably lead to using FB's power for evil even if using it against Trump is good.

That brings me to the present moment, where we have maintained the same ad policies. It occurs to me that it very well may lead to the same result. As a committed liberal I find myself desperately wanting to pull any lever at my disposal to avoid the same result. So what stays my hand?

I find myself thinking of the Lord of the Rings at this moment. Specifically when Frodo offers the ring to Galadrial and she imagines using the power righteously, at first, but knows it will eventually corrupt her. As tempting as it is to use the tools available to us to change the outcome, I am confident we must never do that or we will become that which we fear.

The philosopher John Rawls reasoned that the only moral way to decide something is to remove yourself entirely from the specifics of any one person involved, behind a so called “Veil of Ignorance.” That is the tool that leads me to believe in liberal government programs like universal healthcare, expanding housing programs, and promoting civil rights. It is also the tool that prevents me from limiting the reach of publications who have earned their audience, as distasteful as their content may be to me and even to the moral philosophy I hold so dear.

That doesn’t mean there is no line. Things like incitement of violence, voter suppression, and more are things that same moral philosophy would safely allow me to rule out. But I think my fellow liberals are a bit too, well, liberal when it comes to calling people Nazi’s.

If we don’t want hate mongering politicians then we must not elect them. If they are getting elected then we have to win hearts and minds. If we change the outcomes without winning the minds of the people who will be ruled then we have a democracy in name only. If we limit what information people have access to and what they can say then we have no democracy at all.

Here Bosworth undercuts the entire leftist movement and the #FakeNews media by pointing out that if people vote Democrat because they're lied to we don't have a democracy; we have a tyranny of lies.

If Democrats can run on what they actually will do when elected--raise taxes on middle class workers, take away Union members hard earned healthcare plans, appease Iran and condemn Israel, force Christians to deny their faith, and abrogate the 2nd Amendment by seizing our guns--then that's democracy and we the people deserve to have those policies implemented.

But if leftists run as conservatives saying that we won't lose our Dr or our taxes won't go up then they're fascist liars who hate us and who will treat us poorly.