SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Facebook (FB.O) CEO Mark Zuckerberg
told employees on Tuesday that he stood by his decision not to
challenge inflammatory posts by U.S. President Donald Trump,
refusing to give ground a day after staff members staged a rare
public protest.
A group of Facebook employees – nearly all of them working at
home due to the coronavirus pandemic – walked off the job on
Monday. They complained the company should have acted against
Trump’s posts about protests containing the phrase “when the
looting starts, the shooting starts.”
Zuckerberg told employees Facebook had conducted a thorough
review and was right to leave the posts unchallenged, a company
spokeswoman said. She said Zuckerberg also acknowledged the
decision had upset many people working at the company.
On Friday, Twitter Inc (TWTR.N[1]) affixed a
warning label to a Trump tweet about widespread protests over the
death of a black man in Minnesota that included the phrase “when
the looting starts, the shooting starts.”
Twitter said the post violated its rules against glorifying
violence but was left up as public interest exception, with reduced
options for interactions and distribution.
Facebook declined to act on the same message, and Zuckerberg
sought to distance his company from the fight between the president
and Twitter. He maintained that while he found Trump’s remarks
“deeply offensive,” they did not violate company policy against
incitements to violence.
One employee, who had tweeted his dissent on Monday, posted on
Twitter his disappointment with Facebook executives.
“It’s crystal clear today that leadership refuses to stand with
us,” Brandon Dail wrote on Twitter. Dail’s LinkedIn profile
describes him as a user interface engineer at Facebook in
Seattle.
Timothy Aveni, a junior software engineer on Facebook’s team
dedicated to fighting misinformation, announced on Monday that he
was resigning his position.
“Mark always told us that he would draw the line at speech that
calls for violence. He showed us on Friday that this was a lie.
Facebook will keep moving the goalposts every time Trump escalates,
finding excuse after excuse not to act,” he wrote in a Facebook
post.
Civil rights leaders who attended an hour-long video call on
Monday night with Zuckerberg and top Facebook executives called the
CEO’s explanations for allowing Trump’s posts to stay up
“incomprehensible.”
“He did not demonstrate understanding of historic or modern-day
voter suppression and he refuses to acknowledge how Facebook is
facilitating Trump’s call for violence against protesters,” said a
joint statement from leaders of The Leadership Conference on Civil
and Human Rights, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and
Color of Change.
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Facebook (FB.O) CEO Mark Zuckerberg
told employees on Tuesday that he stood by his decision not to
challenge inflammatory posts by U.S. President Donald Trump,
refusing to give ground a day after staff members staged a rare
public protest.
A group of Facebook employees – nearly all of them working at
home due to the coronavirus pandemic – walked off the job on
Monday. They complained the company should have acted against
Trump’s posts about protests containing the phrase “when the
looting starts, the shooting starts.”
Zuckerberg told employees Facebook had conducted a thorough
review and was right to leave the posts unchallenged, a company
spokeswoman said. She said Zuckerberg also acknowledged the
decision had upset many people working at the company.
On Friday, Twitter Inc (TWTR.N[1]) affixed a
warning label to a Trump tweet about widespread protests over the
death of a black man in Minnesota that included the phrase “when
the looting starts, the shooting starts.”
Twitter said the post violated its rules against glorifying
violence but was left up as public interest exception, with reduced
options for interactions and distribution.
Facebook declined to act on the same message, and Zuckerberg
sought to distance his company from the fight between the president
and Twitter. He maintained that while he found Trump’s remarks
“deeply offensive,” they did not violate company policy against
incitements to violence.
One employee, who had tweeted his dissent on Monday, posted on
Twitter his disappointment with Facebook executives.
“It’s crystal clear today that leadership refuses to stand with
us,” Brandon Dail wrote on Twitter. Dail’s LinkedIn profile
describes him as a user interface engineer at Facebook in
Seattle.
Timothy Aveni, a junior software engineer on Facebook’s team
dedicated to fighting misinformation, announced on Monday that he
was resigning his position.
“Mark always told us that he would draw the line at speech that
calls for violence. He showed us on Friday that this was a lie.
Facebook will keep moving the goalposts every time Trump escalates,
finding excuse after excuse not to act,” he wrote in a Facebook
post.
Civil rights leaders who attended an hour-long video call on
Monday night with Zuckerberg and top Facebook executives called the
CEO’s explanations for allowing Trump’s posts to stay up
“incomprehensible.”
“He did not demonstrate understanding of historic or modern-day
voter suppression and he refuses to acknowledge how Facebook is
facilitating Trump’s call for violence against protesters,” said a
joint statement from leaders of The Leadership Conference on Civil
and Human Rights, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and
Color of Change.