Facebook employees have walked away from their work-from-home desks and taken to Twitter to accuse Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Mark Zuckerberg of not taking a stand against United States (US) President Donald Trump’s hateful posts on social media.
As per the details, Reuters observed dozens of tweets against Mark in what was a rare case of the social media giant’s staff publicly standing against its CEO.
Thousands of people, including seven engineers of teams that maintain the react code library critical for Facebook’s apps, were among those who tweeted.
“Mark is wrong and I will endeavour in the loudest possible way to change his mind,” said Ryan Freitas, director of product design for Facebook’s newsfeed. He added that he mobilised more than 50 like-minded people to lobby for internal change.
Katie Zhu, a product manager at Instagram, tweeted a screenshot showing she had entered “#BLACKLIVESMATTER” to describe her request for time off as part of the walkout.
Facebook Inc will allow its employees to take part in the protest and will not draw down their vacation days, said spokesperson Andy Stone.
Talkspace CEO Oren Frank tweeted he would “not support a platform that incites violence, racism, and lies”. The online therapy company also announced that it had ended partnership discussions with Facebook.
It is worth mentioning here that Facebook CEO landed in hot water when he told Fox News that private social media platforms “shouldn’t be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online”.
President Trump retweeted the interview that had come after Twitter flagged his tweet about mail-in ballots as misleading.
It wasn’t later that Twitter responded to another Trump tweet pertaining to countrywide riots, for glorifying violence. Twitter covered up the tweet with a message warning it “violated Twitter rules about glorifying violence”.
The viewers had to click on the message to see the underlying tweet.
Trump posted the same message on Facebook, but Mark decided to let it stand unchallenged. “I have been struggling with how to respond to the president’s tweets and post all day,” he wrote in a post Friday.
“Personally, I have a visceral negative reaction to this kind of divisive and inflammatory rhetoric,” he said, adding that the company’s position, however, was that it should enable as much expression as possible unless it would cause an imminent risk of specific harms or dangers spelt out in clear policies.
“I don’t know what to do, but I know doing nothing is not acceptable,” Jason Stirman, a member of Facebook’s research and development team, wrote on Twitter in response to Mark.
Should Facebook also move towards policing Trump’s posts? Let The Current know in the comments.
