NEW w/ @RMac18: Mark Zuckerberg intervened to reduce penalties for Alex Jones and Infowars. His decision weakened FB's policies and prevented it from acting earlier against right wing groups like the Oath Keepers that stormed the Capitol, sources say: buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanma…
This story dives deep into how important content moderation/enforcement decisions get made at FB. It reveals how Facebook's powerful policy team, led by Joel Kaplan, repeatedly went against the company's own experts to intervene on changes for fears of conservative backlash.
A telling example: Ben Shapiro's page was promoted to people who do not follow it via "in feed recommendations." FB's own rules said not to promote political pages via IFR. Users complained. But FB didn't take action b/c public policy warned of a backlash. So the rules got bent. 
So traffic and engagement was going to a right wing page thanks to a Facebook product that should not have been promoting it. No one on the right or left should have been in IFR. But FB didn't act because it worried about false accusations of "shadow banning."
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