By Kyle Perisic
More than one hundred conservative Facebook employees have joined an internal employee message board to protest what they call the company’s “intolerant” liberal culture.
The group, “FB’ers for Political Diversity,” was created last week, The New York Times reported Tuesday, and aims to promote ideological diversity within the company. Facebook’s workforce of more than 25,000 is viewed as largely liberal.
“We are a political monoculture that’s intolerant of different views,” wrote senior Facebook engineer and group cofounder Brian Amerige in a post, The NYT added. “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.”
Amerige’s post continues to criticize Facebook’s emphasis on racial and gender diversity and how it, along with the company’s overt liberal bias, threatens the “viability as a company.”
Facebook banned a dissenting conservative group in December 2016, Business Insider reported in August 2017. The group, “Facebook Anon,” was an anonymous group chat for supporters of then-candidate Donald Trump. It was shut down for violating Facebook’s policies against anonymous accounts, but Business Insider reported that the talks “turned ugly and … alarmed management.”
Amerige’s post echoes similar concerns of a memo former Google engineer James Damore wrote in August 2017 that criticized Google’s “ideological echo chamber,” The Daily Caller reported.
“[W]e tear down posters welcoming Trump supporters. We regularly propose removing [tech investor Peter] Thiel from our board because he supported Trump,” Amerige wrote. “We’re quick to suggest firing people who turn out to be misunderstood, and even quicker to conclude our colleagues are bigots.”
Amerige added that Facebook has made “all lives matter” a “fireable offense” and that human resources investigates anyone who dares “criticize Islam’s human rights record.”
Amerige’s concerns are not without any evidence. Facebook cofounder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has donated to left-leaning campaigns in the 2018 and 2020 elections, The Daily Caller News Foundation reported on Aug. 23.
Facebook also has a well-documented history of removing conservative content, some of which was restored with an apologized after public backlash.
Facebook has also removed videos and shadow banned content. Facebook apologize for mistakenly removing videos from the popular conservative page PragerU on Aug. 17, The Daily Caller reported.
FB’ers for Political Diversity’s only rule is “if you attack a person’s character, rather than their ideas, you will be banned.”
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