Facebook Inc. officials say they try to avoid political bias. Try telling that to Democrats.
The relationship between the company and the political left is at an all-time low, more than a dozen Democratic operatives, campaign officials and leaders of progressive groups said in interviews, following a series of company policy decisions widely seen among their ranks as favoring President Trump. Many Democrats and campaign officials are increasingly criticizing Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg in personal terms.
It is a stark departure from the 2016 campaign, when Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg endorsed Democrat Hillary Clinton. The relationship has frayed partly because of actions Facebook took to address criticisms of bias from conservatives and in part owing to revelations from U.S. intelligence and special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on how Russia used Facebook to spread disinformation to boost Mr. Trump’s campaign.
On the campaign trail and in Democratic political circles, there is little love left for the Silicon Valley giant, even as presidential candidates on both sides of the aisle rely on Facebook as a valuable platform for political advertising.
This month, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, former Vice President Joe Biden and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer all lambasted Facebook over misleading videos, ads and hate speech on the platform. Mrs. Clinton recently called Mr. Zuckerberg authoritarian. Those public remarks came after behind-the-scenes discussions between Facebook and Democrats about whether the company was allowing harmful discourse ahead of the 2020 election.
“Progressives think the way Facebook has permitted and amplified disinformation has become antithetical to a well-functioning democracy,” Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank, said in an interview.
Facebook representatives say the company is in an awkward position. Democrats want the company to fulfill its promise to combat misinformation, but conservatives argue that the fact-checking groups employed by Facebook are liberal and could unfairly limit their speech.
“People on both sides of the aisle disagree with some of the positions we’ve taken, but we remain committed to seeking outside perspectives and communicating clearly about why we make the decisions we do,” a Facebook spokesman said in an emailed statement.
The social media platform remains a major part of campaign infrastructure.
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“Facebook is the big bad ugly, but you talk to operatives about where they’re spending their money and it’s Facebook,” said Tim Lim, a Democratic digital strategist.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren and some other presidential candidates are pushing for a breakup of the company, and the Massachusetts lawmaker’s campaign asks supporters to confirm they aren’t an executive at a big tech company before donating to her.
Still, she has put more than $6.8 million into Facebook ads since the start of 2019. Sen. Bernie Sanders, who has also been critical of the company, spent more than $7 million in that time. Mr. Trump’s campaign put more than $22 million toward Facebook ads during the period.
Mr. Lim said campaign officials feel they have no choice but to buy Facebook ads because voters spend so much time on the platform.
Not every campaign is keeping Silicon Valley at arm’s length. A Facebook board member, Jeffrey Zients, who was National Economic Council director during the Obama administration, is backing Mr. Biden for president. He welcomed the former vice president to his Washington home for an evening fundraiser in November. He is among a number of co-hosts for a February fundraising event as well, according to an invitation reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Mr. Biden has said it is worth taking a “really hard look” at breaking up tech companies including Facebook.
Conservatives have long complained of bias in Silicon Valley. In 2016, employees of Facebook donated almost 100 times more to Mrs. Clinton than Mr. Trump, according to federal data. That spring, conservatives were in an uproar after the tech-news site Gizmodo reported that the company altered a list of trending topics to suppress conservative content.
Facebook denied the Gizmodo article, but several conservatives visited the company’s headquarters to discuss the issue.
Mr. Zuckerberg has relied on advice from Peter Thiel, a longtime Facebook board member and Trump backer. Joel Kaplan, one of Facebook’s top policy executives and a former aide to President George W. Bush, has sometimes postponed or killed projects that risk upsetting the political right, the Journal has previously reported.
While Facebook was repairing its relationship with conservatives, many Democrats soured on the company.
Last year, Facebook refused to take down a video that had been altered to appear to show Mrs. Pelosi slurring her words. Facebook executives were divided on how to handle the video but fell back on the stance that a tech company shouldn’t be the arbiter of truth, people familiar with the matter say.
Following that same logic, Facebook said in late September that it wouldn’t fact-check posts, images or ads from politicians on the platform. In October, Facebook allowed an ad run by Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign that included a claim about Mr. Biden’s role in the ouster of a Ukrainian prosecutor. The former vice president’s campaign said the claim was false.
In an Oct. 4 letter, the Biden campaign accused the company of selling “the tools to target certain segments of the population with lies.” Facebook’s global head of elections policy, Katie Harbath, who previously worked with Republicans, responded that the company strove to “empower voters to judge what politicians say for themselves.” The New York Times earlier reported the email exchange, which the Journal also reviewed.
The Biden campaign then urged Facebook to remember that it “promised the public, the United States Congress, and its users…that its platform will no longer be a conduit for misinformation and a tool of political distortion.”
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Earlier this month, Facebook stood by its decision to allow political ads to be targeted to small segments of American voters, unlike moves by its competitors Google and Twitter Inc. Mr. Trump’s campaign used this method to reach narrow voter groups in 2016, but Democrats say such targeting can make it hard to detect misinformation.
Ms. Sandberg has told Democratic operatives that the decisions are tough to make, according to people familiar with those conversations. One person characterized Ms. Sandberg’s behind-the-scenes position as: “I’m a Democrat, this is so hard for me.”
In some discussions with Democrats, Facebook staffers describe Facebook as the public’s “favorite punching bag,” this person said.
A senior Biden campaign official said Facebook had been “nominally cooperative” in making people from the company available to talk about policy differences. This official said Facebook had notified the campaign after a video surfaced on the platform that Mr. Biden’s allies said was falsely edited to make remarks by the former vice president seem racist.
“They understand they have an optics problem,” the Biden official said.
—Chad Day contributed to this article.
Write to Deepa Seetharaman at Deepa.Seetharaman@wsj.com, Joshua Jamerson at joshua.jamerson@wsj.com and Emily Glazer at emily.glazer@wsj.com
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