At an emergency town hall meeting Facebook held this week, days after President Trump posted “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” on his account, 5,500 Facebook employees had a demand for Mark Zuckerberg.
Before the meeting, the employees voted in a poll on which questions to ask the chief executive at the company’s town hall, according to internal documents viewed by The Washington Post.
The question that got the most votes: “Can we please change our policies around political free speech? Fact checking and removal of hate speech shouldn’t be exempt for politicians.”
Zuckerberg also met privately with black executives to discuss their pain and objections to the post, which referred to responding to protesters over George Floyd’s death.
And employees questioned whether Facebook was in an “abusive relationship” with the president, according to a trove of documents that indicated more than 200 posts from an internal message board that showed unrest among employees.
While some Facebook employees have taken to public forums such as Twitter to express their displeasure, the internal poll and the documents show just how widely and quickly their dissent and discontent has spread about Zuckerberg’s decision to double down on allowing unfettered speech by politicians on the platform.
He even appeared on Fox News last week to defend his viewpoint.
Facebook faces a boiling crisis that is dragging the company into yet another major controversy, this one dealing with the explosive matters of police brutality, race and free speech.
And Zuckerberg’s early public words on the issue — in which he said the post didn’t break the company’s rules on inciting violence — have sparked widespread anger internally, with three high-ranking employees quitting in protest and others complaining about the post on rival site Twitter.
Dozens of former employees signed a letter critiquing the decision, saying it was a betrayal of Facebook’s early ideals.
But inside the company, criticism has been even more widespread and personal, according to the documents, which show how many employees believe Trump is purposefully testing them.
Facebook, like other tech giants, has struggled to recruit African Americans, especially in its top ranks.
That has led some employees to say that leadership doesn’t understand how deep the issues are at hand.
Only 4 percent of Facebook employees are black, a number that falls to 3 percent among senior leadership, according to its latest diversity report.
Only one black person, diversity chief Maxine Williams, was involved in making the decision to leave the post up.
Employees there in recent days have wrestled deeply with issues of race and free speech — suspecting that Trump and other Republican leaders are purposefully testing social media companies in the lead up to the 2020 election.
“What’s the point of establishing a principle if we’re going to move the goal posts every time Trump escalates his behavior?” asked software engineer Timothy Aveni on an internal message board over the weekend.
He quit this week.
“My toddler basically does the same thing to test boundaries,” another person said.
Silicon Valley companies, and particularly Facebook, tend to demand loyalty from employees, who typically sign nondisclosure agreements that forbid them from speaking out publicly.
They ply them with big pay, perks and some measure of voice: Holding town halls and allowing them to vent internally on message boards.
Its left-leaning workforce of about 45,000 full-time employees has been a target of President Trump.
At Facebook, employees are recruited with the idealistic mission to connect the world and build products that can impact 2.9 billion users across its family of apps, which includes WhatsApp and Instagram.
But the 2016 election changed the way the world — and workers — viewed Facebook, after Russians meddled in it by amplifying divisive messages to millions of Americans on the platform, showing how easily it could be exploited to hurt democracy.
Two years later, the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal erupted, in which political operatives who had worked for the Trump campaign were found to have breached the personal data of tens of millions of Americans.
Those two incidences and others have engendered a slow-burning crisis of confidence in the company’s leadership and direction, according to employees there and the posts, creating a flash point with last week’s events.
