Facebook also regularly sponsors Netroots Nation, an annual conference for progressive activists. This isn’t the first year it has sponsored CPAC.
But that was before Facebook’s political work generated so much controversy——both inside the company and within the broader Silicon Valley community. In September of 2016, The Daily Beast revealed that Palmer Luckey—the founder of the Oculus Rift virtual reality system, bought by Facebook for $2 billion—was meeting with alt-right icon Milo Yiannopoulos and secretly funding a project to attack Hillary Clinton online; activists launched a campaign immediately afterwards to boycott the firm, and Luckey disappeared from public view for months thereafter.
The Wall Street Journal reported in October that Trump’s own Facebook posts fueled intense debate within the company about what kind of content was acceptable——particularly his calls for a ban on Muslims from entering the U.S. Mark Zuckerberg himself had to determine that Trump’s posts were okay, according to the paper’s report. And The New York Times reported that after Trump won the election, some company employees worried the spread of racist memes and fake news on the site may have boosted his candidacy.
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