Senior Facebook employees took to Twitter over the weekend to express their dismay at CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s decision not to take action on incendiary comments posted to 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.
Facebook’s response to the same content, in a post from Zuckerberg on Friday, was to say: “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 endeavour in the loudest possible way to change his mind,” said Ryan Freitas, director of product design for Facebook’s News Feed. “I apologise if you were waiting for me to have some sort of external opinion. I focused on organising 50+ like-minded folks into something that looks like internal change.”
“Giving a platform to incite violence and spread disinformation is unacceptable, regardless who you are or if it’s newsworthy,” wrote Andrew Crow, head of design for Facebook’s Portal product line.
‘Voicing our concerns’
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 Facebook is committing “an additional $10-million to groups working on racial justice”. Noting that the company “has more work to do to keep people safe and ensure our systems don’t amplify bias”, the CEO did not address the concern surrounding Trump’s posts on the platform. — Reported by Vlad Savov and Sarah Frier, (c) 2020 Bloomberg LP
