Facebook Employees Turn on Tech Giant, Call for More Tolerance of the Right
A group of disgruntled Facebook employees took to the company’s internal message board last week and claimed the social media giant had a “problem with political diversity.”
The New York Times reports the employees posted the message titled, “We Have A Problem With Political Diversity.” The post immediately went viral inside the company.
The post was written by Brian Amerige, a senior engineer for the social media giant.
“We are a political monoculture that’s intolerant of different views,” Amerige said. “We claim to welcome all perspectives, but are quick to attack — often in mobs — anyone who presents a view that appears to be in opposition to left-leaning ideology.”
Amerige claims that due to the culture of disparaging any viewpoints other than “left-leaning” ones, employees are “afraid to say anything when they disagree with what’s around them politically.”
Amerige went on to describe in detail some of the specific ways Facebook has been silencing those it disagrees with.
“We tear down posters welcoming Trump supporters,” he said. “We regularly propose removing (PayPal co-founder Peter) Thiel from our board because he supported Trump. We’re quick to suggest firing people who turn out to be misunderstood, and even quicker to conclude our colleagues are bigots.
“We have made ‘All Lives Matter’ a fireable offense. We put Palmer Luckey through a witch hunt because he paid for anti-Hillary ads. We write each other ad-hoc feedback in the PSC tool for having ‘offensive’ ideas. We ask HR to investigate those who dare to criticize Islam’s human rights record for creating a ‘non-inclusive environment.'”
The Times reports that since Amerige posted the message, more than 100 people have joined him forming an online group labeled, “FB’ers for Political Diversity.”
Ameriage says the purpose of the group is two-fold: Become “a space where you can talk about these issues without fear of the mob,” and second, to be a place to “talk about how we can fix this.”
Facebook has been under the scrutiny of Republicans in Congress as well as President Donald Trump, who have accused Facebook and other social media companies of censoring conservatives.
On Monday, the president posted a tweet that was critical of Google because of a news report suggesting that virtually all of the search engine’s results for “Donald Trump” were negative stories by left-leaning media.
….results on “Trump News” are from National Left-Wing Media, very dangerous. Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and news that is good. They are controlling what we can & cannot see. This is a very serious situation-will be addressed!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 28, 2018
Ameriage challenged his fellow employees to take those accusations to heart.
“We are entrusted by a great part of the world to be impartial and transparent carriers of people’s stories, ideas, and commentary,” he said. “Congress doesn’t think we can do this. The president doesn’t think we can do this. And like them or not, we deserve that criticism.”
He concluded by saying, “Let’s see where this goes.”
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