As 2020 gets underway and November approaches, Facebook and its critics are grappling with the company's role in the impending election—and particularly how it could enable the reelection of President Donald Trump. The tech giant, for its part, has been seemingly openly inviting those fears through its recent actions, drawing widespread criticism for adamantly refusing to fact-check political ads while CEO Mark Zuckerberg hosts conservative dinner parties and gets advice from Peter Thiel. And in an internal memo made public by the New York Times Tuesday, one of the company's other top execs made Facebook's apparent nonchalance toward how its policies facilitate Trump's campaign even more clear. In a wide-ranging Facebook post to employees, executive Andrew Bosworth offered a clear message: Yes, we probably did help elect Trump in 2016. And we're not going to do anything to stop him from getting elected again.

Bosworth, who was in charge of Facebook's advertising efforts during the 2016 election and now heads its virtual and augmented reality division, touches on a broad variety of topics in the memo, from social media addiction and the media's unfair treatment of Facebook, to what happened in 2016. Bosworth details the 2016 Russian interference efforts, misinformation campaigns, and the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which Bosworth described as a case “where the details are almost all wrong but I think the scrutiny is broadly right.” Ultimately, however, the Facebook exec credits Trump's surprising win to the then-candidate's Facebook ad operation, which Bosworth describes as “the high water mark of digital ad campaigns.” “So was Facebook responsible for Donald Trump getting elected? I think the answer is yes, but not for the reasons anyone thinks,” Bosworth writes. “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.”

Of course, Trump and his campaign will now be hoping to replicate that winning advertising strategy as it tries to garner support in 2020—with the help of a Facebook ad policy that can't stop the infamously dishonest president from saying whatever he wants. But in Bosworth's view, Facebook will not, and should not, stop him. Writing that he's realized Facebook's ad policy (which was also in place in 2016) “very well may lead to the same result” of Trump's victory, Bosworth—a “committed liberal” who's “no fan of Trump”—says he's nevertheless decided to shut down his impulse “to pull any lever at my disposal to avoid the same result.”

“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,” Bosworth wrote, making an analogy that's already garnered some criticism for distorting the classic tale. “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 exec went on to note that though situations like “incitement of violence” or “voter suppression” would cross the line for him, he's ultimately opposed to “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.” “If we limit what information people have access to and what they can say then we have no democracy at all,” Bosworth wrote. (In a statement provided to the Times, Bosworth said his post “wasn’t written for public consumption,” but that he “hoped this post would encourage my co-workers to continue to accept criticism with grace as we accept the responsibility we have overseeing our platform.”)