Here’s something you don’t hear every day: Conservative political commentator Glenn Beck says he believes Mark Zuckerberg shares a fundamental belief in the principles of liberty and freedom of speech.
Glenn Beck says he believes Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg are acting in good faith
The conservative commentator walked away from Wednesday’s meeting obviously impressed.
Photo by J Pat Carter/Getty Images
Takes your breath away, doesn’t it?
Beck acknowledges there’s plenty of mistrust of the mainstream media in conservative circles. The mere fact that a single allegation of bias in one Facebook product turned out “the pitchforks” speaks to a fundamental lack of trust, he notes.
But the television commentator emerged from Wednesday’s meeting with an obvious admiration for Facebook’s founder, who openly admitted that the social network is far from perfect, though it’s striving to get better. That Zuckerberg invited conservatives to Menlo Park was, in Beck’s words, “staggering,” noting that right-of-center voices are rarely invited to the table for an open dialogue.
Beck writes that he believes Zuckerberg when the Facebook founder says he wants the social network to be an open place. He reserved his criticism for his conservative counterparts, who arrived at Facebook with a list of demands, prompting him to ask “What happened to us?”
I sat there looking around and heard things like: 1) Facebook has a very liberal workforce. Has Facebook considered diversity in their hiring practice? The country is 2% Mormon. Maybe Facebook’s company should better reflect that reality. 2) Maybe Facebook should consider a six-month training program to help their biased and liberal workforce understand and respect conservative opinions and values. 3) We need to see strong and specific steps to right this wrong. It was like affirmative action for conservatives. When did conservatives start demanding quotas AND diversity training AND less people from Ivy League Colleges.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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