Facebook’s refusal to police President Trump’s posts on the platform prompted some of its earliest employees to raise concerns with the company’s chief executive officer Wednesday.
More than 30 former Facebook employees involved in the company’s formative years signed an open letter urging CEO Mark Zuckerberg to reconsider its policies for political speech, putting pressure on him to potentially follow in the footsteps of competing social networking services such as Twitter and Snapchat, and start to rein in Mr. Trump’s account.
The letter, first published by The New York Times, came after the president ignored a firestorm by threatening violence on a social media post against people robbing stores in cities where unrest has erupted following last week’s racially charged killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Mr. Trump said Friday on both Facebook and Twitter that, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” resulting in the latter company to flag the tweet for glorifying violence. Facebook has failed to take action on the post, however, and Mr. Zuckerberg defended leaving it untouched, prompting the nearly three dozen former employees to fire back.
“President Trump’s post on Friday not only threatens violence by the state against its citizens, it also sends a signal to millions who take cues from the President,” wrote the group of nearly three dozen former Facebook designers, engineers, executives and other employees, including some involved in creating the company’s early policies.
The former employees also slammed Facebook for not subjecting content shared on its platform by the president and other politicians to rules applied to other users, as well as its reluctance to verify claims made in what political figures post from their accounts.
“It claims that providing warnings about a politician’s speech is inappropriate, but removing content from citizens is acceptable, even if both are saying the same thing,” they wrote in the letter. “That is not a noble stand for freedom. It is incoherent, and worse, it is cowardly. Facebook should be holding politicians to a higher standard than their constituents.”
“Fact-checking is not censorship. Labeling a call to violence is not authoritarianism. Please reconsider your position,” they concluded the letter.
Facebook declined to comment on the letter when reached by The Washington Times.
Floyd, 46, died May 25 while in the custody of the Minneapolis Police Department. Four officers involved were subsequently fired from the force and charged with related crimes. Peaceful protests against racism and police brutality have since emerged across the country, albeit marred in some cities where stores have been looted amid the unrest.
Hundreds of Facebook employees staged a virtual walk-out on Monday over the company’s failure to deal with Mr. Trump’s post, and several engineers said they resigned on Tuesday.
Mr. Zuckerberg, 36, has repeatedly defended Facebook’s decision not to censor the president since the posting first made waves last Friday.
“I know many people are upset that we’ve left the President’s posts up, but our position is that we should enable as much expression as possible unless it will cause imminent risk of specific harms or dangers spelled out in clear policies,” Mr. Zuckerberg explained that evening.
More recently, the company behind the popular Snapchat social network said Wednesday that it will stop promoting Mr. Trump’s account on the platform over concerns his posts may incite violence.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.