Facebook Employees Are Rebelling Against Mark Zuckerberg’s Lack of Action on Trump’s Violent Posts

While we would all love to see Twitter just ban all the Nazis once and for all, the platform has, in recent weeks, at least begun to take small steps toward creating a less egregiously dangerous online space. Most notably, they flagged one of Donald Trump’s tweets for glorifying violence. They didn’t remove the tweet, in which Trump repeats a decades-old racist adage about looting leading to shooting, but at least they didn’t do absolutely nothing. And in that way, they set themselves apart from Facebook.

Trump cross-posted his looting tweet to Facebook, where it was not flagged. Mark Zuckerberg went on Fox News of all places to talk about how they “have a different policy than Twitter” on the issue of fact-checking. In a statement later posted to Facebook, Zuckerberg said he chose to leave Trump’s post up because the site should “enable as much expression as possible.”

As it turns out, many of Zuckerberg’s own employees do not agree with his decision. In an unprecedented move at the company, Facebook employees staged a “virtual walkout” and shared messages of dissent on social media.

According to the New York Times, there are petitions circling internally “calling for the company to make personnel changes and for more diversity of voices among Mr. Zuckerberg’s top lieutenants.” At least two senior employees have told their managers they’ll quit if  Zuckerberg doesn’t take down Trump’s inflammatory post.

Some are also calling for Zuckerberg to fire Facebook’s vice president of global policy, Joel Kaplan, who “is seen as being a strong conservative voice within the company. In 2018, he upset some employees when he sat in the front row of the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was a close friend.”

Late Sunday night, Zuckerberg posted a “We stand with the Black community” message to his Facebook account and pledged to donate $10 million of Facebook’s money “to groups working on racial justice.” Which is a fine step but for one thing, $10 million dollars is drop in Facebook’s bucket. This would also mean more if it didn’t appear to hastily come the night before a mass public protest. And finally, you cannot throw money at a problem and claim to “stand with the Black community” when your own employees are protesting over how severely you have recently let that community down.

(via New York Times, image: ATTILA KISBENEDEK/AFP/Getty Images)

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Vivian Kane

Vivian Kane (she/her) is the Senior News Editor at The Mary Sue, where she's been writing about politics and entertainment (and all the ways in which the two overlap) since the dark days of late 2016. Born in San Francisco and radicalized in Los Angeles, she now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she gets to put her MFA to use covering the local theatre scene. She is the co-owner of The Pitch, Kansas City’s alt news and culture magazine, alongside her husband, Brock Wilbur, with whom she also shares many cats.

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