Facebook staff revolt over handling of Trump posts
Some Facebook employees staged a ‘walkout’ to protest its decision to leave up a Donald Trump post about social unrest.
Some Facebook employees have staged a virtual walkout to protest CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to leave up a post from President Trump about the recent social unrest, comments they believed violated the company’s rules about inciting violence.
Over the weekend, more than a dozen employees spoke out on Twitter against Mr Zuckerberg’s decision to keep up a post from the president, which called the demonstrators thugs and warned: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.”
Some employees set up their remote work stations to say they were not working on Monday to voice their disagreement with Mr Zuckerberg, according to people familiar with the matter and public tweets from Facebook employees. The walkout was confirmed by a company spokeswoman.
Facebook says it refrains from fact-checking or removing politicians’ posts on the platform but will take down posts that glorify violence and spread voter misinformation. Some employees and outside academics who study Facebook’s content rules said the looting post, along with an earlier one that contained inaccuracies about voting by mail, broke the company’s rules.
“I’m a FB employee that completely disagrees with Mark’s decision to do nothing about Trump’s recent posts, which clearly incite violence,” tweeted Jason Stirman, who lists himself as a design manager at Facebook on his LinkedIn page. “I’m not alone inside of FB. There isn’t a neutral position on racism.”
On Friday, Mr Zuckerberg said those posts would remain, despite his own view that the looting post was “deeply offensive.” He said that even though he knew many disagreed, he believed it was “better to have this discussion out in the open, especially when the stakes are so high.”
Late on Sunday night, Mr Zuckerberg said Facebook would commit $US10 million to groups working on racial justice.
Mr Trump’s tweet was in the early stages of the protests sparked by the death of George Floyd, a black man, while in police custody in Minneapolis. Those protests have spread nationwide in the days since.
Although employee activism has been common around Silicon Valley in recent years, the public outcry is unusual for Facebook employees, who have typically kept their disagreements in-house over the past several years of scandals. But the events of the last few days pushed these debates into public view, mirroring similar developments at rival tech companies like Alphabet and Amazon.com.
“Mark is wrong, and I will endeavour in the loudest possible way to change his mind,” said Ryan Freitas, director of product design on news feed at Facebook, in a tweet.
In a statement, the Facebook spokeswoman said, “We recognise the pain many of our people are feeling right now, especially our Black community. We encourage employees to speak openly when they disagree with leadership. As we face additional difficult decisions around content ahead, we’ll continue seeking their honest feedback.”
The spokeswoman declined to say how many employees were involved in the walkout Monday. The New York Times earlier reported the walkout.
The employee unrest adds to the difficulties confronting Facebook regarding the social-media habits of President Trump. Even though Facebook has taken a hands-off approach to the president, he has continued to include the company in his complaints about unfair treatment for conservatives, a beef that led him last week to issue an executive order that would strip some companies of one of their most important legal protections.
Twitter, by contrast, shielded from public view the looting tweet from Mr Trump. It can now only be seen after users click a box with a notice saying it violated Twitter’s rules against encouraging violence. Another tweet from the president, in which he said voting by mail would lead to rampant fraud, was affixed with a label encouraging users to “Get the facts about mail-in ballots” and referring them to other sources of information.
Mr Trump and others, largely from the right, have argued that the moves are akin to censorship and that private companies shouldn’t be in the business of regulating political speech.
The same messages were cross-posted to Mr Trump’s Facebook page, and no action has been taken against them.
One Facebook employee said part of the issue is that Facebook hasn’t given itself the same options as Twitter when dealing with such posts.
“I will be participating in today’s virtual walkout in solidarity with the black community inside and outside FB,” tweeted Sara Zhang, a Facebook product designer. “@Facebook’s recent decision to not act on posts that incite violence ignores other options to keep our community safe. The policy pigeon holes us into addressing harmful user-facing content in two ways: keep content up or take it down.”
The angry tone within Facebook is a contrast to the last several weeks, when morale was generally high over the company’s response to the new coronavirus. Many employees felt the company had regained purpose and supported Mr Zuckerberg’s steps to elevate accurate information about the virus and rely on world health experts.
One employee said the angst within the company is greater than when Joel Kaplan, a top global policy executive, appeared at a hearing to support Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh in the fall of 2018. At that time, hundreds of insiders expressed outrage over Mr. Kaplan’s decision, arguing it was hypocritical that a senior executive would appear at such a highly politicised hearing when so many employees were discouraged from expressing their own political views externally.
Mr Trump’s tweet saying “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” was a line that some people took to refer to the former police chief of Miami when he cracked down on US civil-rights protests, as well as the former governor of Alabama, known for his opposition to the US civil-rights movement.
Mr Trump later defended his message as being misunderstood. “It was spoken as a fact, not as a statement,” he said in a subsequent tweet. “I didn’t want this to happen, and that’s what the expression put out last night means.”
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