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George Floyd Affair: Mark Zuckerberg’s Impossible Balancing Act

Faced with mounting tensions in the ranks of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg tried to defuse the anger that began with the murder of George Floyd and the way the social network reacted to the affair.

The discontent persists at Facebook. After Mark Zuckerberg’s controversial stance on Donald Trump’s recent statements, a hushed war has broken out in the ranks of the company. Many officials have shown their opposition to the CEO and some have even decided to resign, tired of the social network policy.

To try to calm things down a little, the management spoke to more than 25,000 staff on Tuesday morning to justify its decision. The almost complete transcript of this intervention has been published on the Vox website. and lets see a Mark Zuckerberg in the middle of a balancing act.

“It’s very difficult to do everything everyone wants”

For the young CEO, the tweet pinned by Twitter and posted in parallel on Facebook East “Clearly a call for aggressive policing – perhaps excessive”, but cannot be taken as “A subliminal message encouraging militias to deliver justice itself”. This is why, according to him, this message has all the legitimacy of the world to be published on Facebook.

In the eyes of Mark Zuckerberg, this is more akin to “A discussion around the use of force by state authorities“, which would be perfectly accepted on the platform. If he recognizes that the problems of institutional racism “Desperately need to be fixed”, he finds it impossible for Facebook to take sides on this debate, because anyway “It’s very difficult for us to do everything everyone wants” without attracting criticism from one side or the other.

Zuckerberg says video of George Floyd murder and Donald Trump speech must remain published as platform must allow “To make visible and discuss painful things”. This did not prevent the founder from emphasizing during a discussion with Donald Trump that this message was “Useless, inflammatory and source of division”.

Hierarchical imbalance

The moderation policy of Facebook is therefore not to blame according to Zuckerberg, who does not refrain from changing the rules if the need arises and if the United States entered “An extended period of social protest”. Facebook is no stranger to the moderation of presidential speech: at the beginning of the year, Donald Trump campaign team’s false advertisement was censoredsays Zuckerberg. This decision followed a controversy in late 2019, during which Facebook was widely criticized. for the proliferation of a misleading video featuring Joe Biden, Donald Trump’s opponent of the 2020 presidential election.

The CEO’s attempted defusal was disrupted by a discordant voice, who noticed that the George Floyd panel only had one black person out of seven. Last but not least, the hastily appointed “integrity officer” last year was not present during the proceedings.

According to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s biggest mistake is the lack of transparency from management. The term is thus repeated ten times by the young multimillionaire. At a time when the United States is dividing more than ever, when Twitter has implicitly taken a position in the debate and when the responsibility of platforms in the dissemination of controversial messages is questioned, the “transparency” advocated by Mark Zuckerberg will be enough -she ? Will the CEO be able to impose his own vision of content moderation? Nothing is less sure.

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