It seems like just yesterday that I was blogging about Facebook's nascent culture, doesn't it? Probably because it was yesterday: specifically, yesterday morning.
Facebook employees staged a “virtual walkout” Monday in protest of the social media company’s failure to address President Donald Trump’s use of its platform to spread incendiary content.
It’s unclear how many of the company’s 48,000 global employees are participating in the walkout by taking the day off. Many of Facebook’s employees were already working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
A number of the virtual protesters said they planned to use their time to attend the physical demonstrations against police brutality around the country.
Wow. Just... wow.
Again, I have to emphasize just how much of a culture shift this represents. A year and half ago, Facebook's rank and file were talkingshop using burner phones to avoid having managers overhear, and complaining about the unfairness of Facebook's media coverage. Yesterday, they staged a walkout to protest Facebook itself.Welcome to the ethical tech world, Facebookies*. Here's hoping you can make enough noise to force some ethics on the doings of gigantic corporation that employs you.
UPDATE:
More on this story today, from MarketWatch:
Sigh... Oh, well. Baby steps.
* BTW, this is the logic chain for "Facebookie" as short-hand for Facebook employee:
Dozens of Facebook Inc. employees staged a virtual walkout Monday morning to protest executives’ decision not to challenge President Donald Trump’s inflammatory posts, part of what appears to be a movement to challenge the leadership of Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg.
The employees, who requested time off in support of protesters nationwide, included automated email messages saying that they were out of the office in a show of protest. Other workers have threatened to quit, while some have circulated petitions.
“I am not proud of how we’re showing up,” Jason Toff, Facebook’s director of product management, tweeted Sunday. “The majority of co-workers I’ve spoken to feel the same way. We are making our voice heard.”
At least one employee, Owen Anderson, announced via tweet he was leaving Facebook on Monday. “To be clear, this was in the works for a while,” he said. “But after last week, I am happy to no long (sic) support policies and values I vehemently disagree with.”
Another, Timothy Aveni, an engineer who worked on misinformation tools, said he was resigning. “Mark [Zuckerberg] always told us that he would draw the line at speech that calls for violence. He showed us on Friday that this was a lie,” Aveni said in a Facebook post Monday.
To see Facebookies* talk about resigning is news enough; to see them using the L-word, liar, to describe Facebook's CEO may be an event without precedent. Zuckerberg, naturally, is defending his decisions on this issue. Apparently FB shareholders aren't much moved, either - the firm's stock price ended the day up.
In good news, though, you can now delete Facebook posts without having to delete your entire Facebook account, so... there's that. It's interesting timing for this announcement, given that Google, Microsoft, Sony, and others all called off product announcements scheduled for this week as being badly timed, given what's currently going on. Apparently Zuck doesn't really thing that anything's too crass for Facebook.
* BTW, this is the logic chain for "Facebookie" as short-hand for Facebook employee:
- Facebook employees make Facebook, making them Facebook-makers.
- Book-makers are also called bookies, i.e. in gambling contexts.
- Ergo, Facebook-makers are Face-bookies.