Senior Facebook employees over the weekend took to Twitter to express their dismay at CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s decision not to take action on incendiary comments posted on the social network by US President Donald Trump.
After the president tweeted a message with the words “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” in response to protests over the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Twitter for the first time obscured one of his tweets, marking it with a warning that it breached service rules by glorifying violence.
Responding to the same content, Zuckerberg on Friday said: “We think people need to know if the government is planning to deploy force.”
Several senior figures at Facebook expressed strong disagreement.
“Mark is wrong, and I will endeavor in the loudest possible way to change his mind,” tweeted Ryan Freitas, director of product design for Facebook’s News Feed.
“I apologize if you were waiting for me to have some sort of external opinion. I focused on organizing 50+ likeminded folks into something that looks like internal change,” he added.
“Censoring information that might help people see the complete picture *is* wrong. But giving a platform to incite violence and spread disinformation is unacceptable, regardless who you are or if it’s newsworthy. I disagree with Mark’s position and will work to make change happen,” wrote Andrew Crow, head of design for Facebook’s Portal product line.
Joining them with individual messages against the passive policy were design manager Jason Stirman, director of product management Jason Toff and product designer Sara Zhang, who tweeted that “internally we are voicing our concerns, so far to no avail.”
In a post late on Sunday, Zuckerberg said that Facebook is committing “an additional [US]$10 million to groups working on racial justice.”
He said that the company “has more work to do to keep people safe and ensure our systems don’t amplify bias,” but he did not address the concern surrounding Trump’s posts on the platform.
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