Facebook employees are staging a rebellion over cofounder Mark Zuckerberg’s refusal to act against US President Donald Trump, expressing their dissatisfaction with their boss on social media in a rare public display of dissent and, in some cases, staging a “virtual” walkout.
Disagreement came from employees at all levels of the company, including some senior staff.
Particular criticism was leveled at Zuckerberg’s personal decision to leave up the Facebook version of a tweet sent by Trump in which the US president appeared to encourage police to shoot rioters.
Photo: AFP
By contrast, Twitter hid the message behind a warning.
On Friday, Zuckerberg said he disagreed with Twitter’s interpretation of Trump’s statement, which included the phrase: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.”
Where Twitter had read the statement as incitement — encouraging police to shoot at protesters — Zuckerberg said he read it as a warning to protesters that the police would be shooting at them.
The distinction meant that the post fell on the right side of Facebook’s rules, Zuckerberg said, and would not be removed.
The Facebook founder’s statement galvanized responses from within his organization.
“Mark is wrong, and I will endeavor in the loudest possible way to change his mind,” said Ryan Freitas, the director of product design for Facebook’s News Feed.
Others who spoke out included product management director Jason Toff and product designer Sara Zhang.
The complaints are mirrored in internal discussions, according to reports in the New York Times and the Verge, where workers accused the company of applying its rules unevenly so as to avoid angering Trump.
More than a dozen Facebook employees had published messages of dissent on Twitter by Monday morning, with some saying they were participating in a “virtual walkout.”
The vast majority of Facebook employees are working from home because of the coronavirus outbreak.
Dozens of employees requested the day off to support protests against police brutality, according to the New York Times.
Some appealed to the company’s oversight board, a quasi-independent body that Facebook has funded to act as a “supreme court” capable of ruling on difficult questions around content moderation.
However, on Saturday, the board said it would not be able to intervene in time, but was “working hard to set the board up to begin operating later this year.”
A cochair of the nascent body is embroiled in a separate controversy around racist speech.
Michael McConnell, a Stanford Law professor, is facing widespread criticism from students and faculty after he used the N-word during a Zoom lecture on Wednesday last week — two days after the death of George Floyd.
McConnell stopped the Zoom software from recording before he spoke the word as part of a quotation attributed to Patrick Henry.
The Stanford Black Law Student Association responded with a scathing open letter written as “A Guide for White Professors on How to Say ‘[N-word]’ in Class.”
After satirizing the timeworn arguments of those who defend use of the slur — “After all, we can’t sanitize history” — they added: “If there is one thing black students know, it’s our own history. Ahmaud Arbery is our history. Breonna Taylor is our history. George Floyd is our history. White men refusing to stop saying [N-word] is our history.”
In an e-mail reviewed by the Guardian, McConnell said he “made the pedagogical choice with goodwill,” but understood why students were upset and “will not use the word again in the future.”
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