FACEBOOK EMPLOYEES WALK OUT, SAY TRUMP’S POSTS MUST BE REINED IN

Facebook employees walked away from their work-from-home desks on Monday and took to Twitter to accuse Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Mark Zuckerberg of inadequately policing US President Donald Trump’s posts as strictly as the rival platform has done, Fanny Potkin, Elizabeth Culliford and Katie Paul wrote for Reuters on June 2, 2020.

Reuters saw dozens of online posts from employees critical of Zuckerberg’s decision to leave Trump’s most inflammatory verbiage unchallenged where Twitter had labeled it. Some top managers participated in the protest, reminiscent of a 2018 walkout at Alphabet Inc.’s Google over sexual harassment.

It was a rare case of staff publicly taking their CEO to task, with one employee tweeting that thousands participated. Among them were all seven engineers on the team maintaining the React code library which supports Facebook’s apps.

“Facebook’s recent decision to not act on posts that incite violence ignores other options to keep our community safe. We implore the Facebook leadership to #TakeAction,” they said in a joint statement published on Twitter. “Mark is wrong, and I will endeavor in the loudest possible way to change his mind,” wrote Ryan Freitas, identified on Twitter as director of product design for Facebook’s News Feed. He added he had mobilized “50+ like-minded folks” to lobby for internal change. A Facebook employee said Zuckerberg’s weekly Friday question-and-answer session would be moved up this week to Tuesday.