After the measures that Twitter has taken with Trump’s violent messages, Facebook employees are pressing for this social network to act as well.
It was not foreseeable that in these times there was a debate about whether a president can write any type of message on a social network and whether it should censor its content, but after the initiative taken by Twitter to block Trump’s false or violent messages, this Controversy has also spread to Facebook. Although as usual, the company of Mark Zuckerberg has another perspective.
Since Facebook has chosen not to take action with Trump’s messages despite its violence or false content, an aspect that has displeased the company’s employees, who have chosen in response to carry out the first virtual strike in the company.
But what is a virtual strike? This can be done thanks to teleworking and it is simply closing all Facebook systems on their computers and configuring automatic response to emails with the message that they are absent. In this way, the workers have protested during the last hours.
Criticism of Zuckerberg’s path has come from all kinds of employees, not just programmers, but also design team leaders and managers. The testimony of engineer Lauren Tan collected by Gizmodo is an example: ” Facebook’s inaction to delete the Trump publication that incites violence makes me ashamed to work here. I totally disagree with that. I enjoy the technical parts of my work and work together with intelligent and kind people, but this is not correct. Silence is complicity “.
But this can go further and there is talk in various US media about the possible resignation of managers and the resignations they are suffering from candidates who were going to join the company in the future.
To prove Zuckerberg’s lack of coherence in this debate, a tweet is also being recovered in which one of his statements is seen, where he affirms that he would remove the content of any publication that incited violence.
In any case, the history of Facebook is especially controversial in everything that refers to political discourse and the use that has been made of the social network in electoral processes, such as the case of Cambridge Analytica, and it becomes difficult to think that after the road traveled there are changes in the direction marked by Mark Zuckerberg. We will see if this 2020 gives us another surprise.