Facebook has been in the news a lot recently, with hearings in US courts over anti-trust and privacy concerns and data leaks. Recently, Facebook was involved in a racial debate amongst its employees and Zuckerberg himself.
This all started at the end of May 2020 when the protests in the US were rampant and the US President Mr. Donald Trump wrote that the military was with him and “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”. There was a huge backlash against Trump for the post but Zuckerberg faced even more as he let the post stand arguing that the platform was a neutral space with freedom of expression and even though he had his own principles and morals, the policies of Facebook could not be affected by them.
The same day the director of public policy for trust and safety at Facebook stated that they weren’t necessarily neutral in response to a question of neutrality being incompatible with racial progress. This caused a disappointment amongst its employees who staged a virtual walkout in June.
Meanwhile, Joel Kaplan, who is Facebook’s VP of Global Public Policy, also came in the news for allegedly stopping Facebook from taking actions considered hostile to conservatives. In audio logs obtained by the Verge, Zuckerberg denied this during their weekly sessions at Facebook expressing disappointment that his own employees would question him.
All in all, even though a lot of employees expressed disapproval of Facebook’s stance on the racial matter including Trump and Joel Kaplan saving the conservatives through Facebook, Zuckerberg affirmed that their public policy did not favour anyone in particular and it is just a platform for expression but they would work on how they affect civil rights, keeping in mind Facebook’s influence on public affairs.
