Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and chief executive, sees no reason to take any action against Donald Trump’s publications considered by company officials to be misleading, inciting violence and responsible for a climate of fear and violence against black citizens in the country.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Zuckerberg said at an internal meeting of the company this Tuesday that he considers Trump’s publications “deeply offensive”But that this is no reason for private companies to interfere in political discourse and that suppressing the debate is worse than conducting it publicly.
The meeting was motivated by the protests of a series of employees of the technological giant, who made a “virtual standstill”On Monday for considering that Trump’s words are often going against company policy. They ask Facebook to abandon the neutral position it has maintained and that has led two of them, both software engineers, to leave the company for failing before Trump.
The first to do so publicly was Timothy J. Aveni, with a message posted on LinkedIn under the title #blacklivesmatter (and that can be read ON HERE), which was added Owen Anderson, also an engineer, who on Twitter said he was “proud”For not being part of the company.
They were not the only ones. Several messages between officials were revealed at the end of last week and they read the frustration that led them to ask for explanations and to show a position of strength. “I must say that I am finding the contours we have to go through incredibly difficult to swallow”, wrote one of them, quoted by “The Verge”, followed by another, which points to what may still be coming. “All of this indicates a very high risk of an escalation of violence and civil unrest in November and, if we fail the test here, history will not gently judge us. ”
Still others, such as the engineer Brandon Dail, chose to speak publicly: “It is clear as water that the leadership [do Facebook] refuses to stand by us, ”he published, also on Twitter.
At issue are two texts that the American president has replicated on both social networks, Twitter and Facebook, and that have led to violent complaints from citizens from all quarters, inside and outside the USA. Twitter itself, not deleting them, left a warning to those who read them.
The first of these posts was published by the US president last Tuesday, May 26, and insinuates that the elections scheduled for November, in which Trump can be reelected, will be fraudulent if the idea of some states to institute the postal vote to bypass the limitations imposed by covid-19. “There is NO WAY (ZERO!) That postal votes are anything less than substantially fraudulent“Wrote Trump, suggesting that these could be stolen, forged or” even illegally printed and fraudulently signed “.
Twitter responded with a link, marked with an exclamation point, to refer to a page with factual information about this type of vote. “Know the facts about voting by mail”, it reads.
On Friday, Trump turned to the same social media to write that the protesters on the streets in protest over the death of George Floyd, asphyxiated by a police officer, are “bandits”. And he wrote more: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts”, He threatened, referring to the violence and assaults that have been seen in some protests.
Twitter again made a warning to navigation: “glorifies violence”. Those responsible chose not to delete it – “it may be in the public interest that the ‘tweet’ remains accessible” – but reinforced the position “against extolling violence”. Facebook took no action.
The news that Zuckerberg’s company will continue in silence has already been condemned by some figures linked to anti-racist activism, who say they are “disappointed” and “stunned” by the decision. The internal upheaval is also seen as the main threat to the leadership of Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook more than 15 years ago.
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