Facebook Engineer's Stunning
Admission: "We Tear Down Posters Welcoming Trump Supporters"
On Tuesday morning,
President Trump lashed out at Google, with his remarks later
broadening to include Twitter and Facebook, accusing it of "rigging"
search results by presenting only results "from National Left-Wing
Media" and accused "Google & others are suppressing voices of
Conservatives and hiding information and news that is
good."
Those companies
"better be careful because you can’t do that to people," Trump said
later in the Oval Office. "I think that Google, and Twitter and Facebook,
they are really treading on very, very troubled territory and they have to be
careful. It is not fair to large portions of the population.”
Google immediately responded, condemning Trump's
charge, and claiming that "Search is not used to set a political agenda
and we don’t bias our results toward any political ideology."
And yet, as so often
happens, in Trump's crude delivery, the politically
incorrect truth was once again found.
According to a memo posted
on Facebook's internal message board titled "We Have a Problem With Political Diversity", and which was published by the New York
Times,
senior Facebook engineer Brian Amerige confirmed Trump's allegation writing
that "we are a political monoculture that’s intolerant of different views" and shockingly
admitted that "we claim to welcome
all perspectives, but are quick to attack — often in mobs — anyone who presents
a view that appears to be in opposition to left-leaning ideology. We throw labels that end
in *obe and *ist at each other, attacking each other’s character rather than
their ideas."
The scathing indictment of
Facebook's liberal "mono-culture" continues: We do this so consistently that employees are
afraid to say anything when they disagree with what’s around
them politically. HR
has told me that this is not a rare concern, and I’ve personally gotten over a
hundred messages to that effect. Your colleagues are afraid because they know
that they — not their ideas — will be attacked. They know that all the talk of “openness to
different perspectives” does not apply to causes of “social justice,” immigration,
“diversity”, and “equality.” On this issues, you can either keep quiet or
sacrifice your reputation and career.
"These are not fears without cause" Amerige writes, and
continues the stunning disclosure of the company's biased culture, "Because we tear down posters welcoming Trump supporters. We regularly propose
removing Thiel from our board because he supported Trump. We’re quick to
suggest firing people who turn out to be misunderstood, and even quicker to
conclude our colleagues are bigots. We have made “All Lives Matter” a fireable
offense. We put Palmer Luckey
through a witch hunt because he paid for anti-Hillary ads. We write each other ad-hoc
feedback in the PSC tool for having “offensive” ideas. We ask HR to investigate
those who dare to criticize Islam’s human rights record for creating a “non-inclusive
environment.” And they called me a transphobe when I called out our corporate
art for being politically radical.
Amerige wasn't alone in
his criticism of Silicon Valley's liberal bias, and as the NYT reports, since
the post went up, "more than 100
Facebook employees have joined Mr. Amerige to form an online group called
FB’ers for Political Diversity." The aim of the initiative,
according to Mr. Amerige’s memo, is to create a space for ideological diversity
within the company.
The new group has upset
other Facebook employees, who said its online posts were offensive to
minorities. One engineer, who
declined to be identified for fear of retaliation, said several people had
lodged complaints with their managers about FB’ers for Political Diversity and were told that it had
not broken any company rules.
According to the NYT, the
activity is a rare sign of organized dissent within Facebook
"over the company’s largely
liberal workplace culture." While the new group
is just a sliver of Facebook’s work force of more than 25,000, the company’s
workers have in the past appeared less inclined than their peers at other tech
companies to challenge leadership, and most have been loyalists to its chief
executive, Mark Zuckerberg.
It gets better: within
Facebook, employees have argued over the decisions to ban certain accounts
while allowing others. At staff meetings some workers have repeatedly asked for
more guidance on what content the company disallows, and why.
The
dispute over employees’ political ideology arose a week before Sheryl Sandberg,
Facebook’s chief operating officer, is scheduled to testify at a Senate hearing
about social media manipulation in elections. A team helping Ms. Sandberg get
ready for the hearing
next Wednesday has warned her that some Republican lawmakers may raise
questions about Facebook and biases, according to two people involved in the
preparations.
In May, Facebook announced
that former Senator Jon Kyl, an Arizona Republican, would lead an inquiry into
allegations of anticonservative bias on the social network, where new employees
supposedly go through training that describes how to have respectful
conversations about politics and diversity, and yet fail to achieve any
results.
As for the outspoken
Facebook engineer, Amerige - who started working at Facebook in 2012 - said on
his personal website that he followed philosophical principles laid out by the
philosopher and writer Ayn Rand. He posted the 527-word memo about political
diversity at Facebook on Aug. 20.
On issues like diversity
and immigration, he wrote, “you can either keep quiet or sacrifice your
reputation and career.”
Amerige proposed that
Facebook employees debate their political ideas in the new group — one of tens
of thousands of internal groups that cover a range of topics — adding that this
debate would better equip the company to host a variety of viewpoints on its
platform.
As for the prevailing bias
withing Facebook, Amerige's conclusion is simple: "This is not okay. Not
just for our internal culture, but for our own viability as a
company."
"While the problem
isn’t unique to us, we are entrusted by a great part of the world to be
impartial and transparent carriers of people’s stories, ideas, and commentary.
Congress doesn’t think we can do this. The President doesn’t think we can do
this. And like them or not,
we deserve that criticism" he admits.
"We
are blind to and dismissive of what people beyond our walls (let alone even
within our walls) think about complex issues that matter.
I’ve
been here for nearly 6.5 years and this has gotten exponentially worse in the
last 2."Or
ever since Trump became president. Amerige's full memo is below (pdf
link).
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody
GA Tea Party Leader
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