If reports are to be believed, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is nowadays personally micromanaging discussion threads on the tech giant’s internal messaging platform.
At any other time, this might have sounded like “fake news” right out the gate – what with Facebook having 50K+ employees, and Zuckerberg no doubt having a busy schedule of his own over there.
But these are no ordinary times, and these reports claim that Zuckerberg personally intervened to clamp down on an employee who had something positive to say about the police – in the context of the Kenosha shooting, and the ensuing controversies.
The “venerable” Business Insider uses the term “debate” – while in reality, judging by the writeup – any debate had been annihilated as if it were an actual crime.
The main takeaways from the message that allegedly sparked such heated debated on Facebook’s Workplace message board came from an employee who, several days after the Kenosha shooting, said that the police in the US were victimized and not racist by default – and neither was their country’ entire justice system.
Additionally, the report quoted the Facebook employee posting on the internal message board that it might not be racism but drugs and lack of appropriate response to police orders that had led to the outcome of the many tragic police shootings.
According to reports, this caused an uproar of criticism that eventually cowed the poster into deleting their comments.
Where Zuckerberg comes in, is a message he penned to employees that “appears” to reference the incident.
Zuckerberg’s post said that while Facebook had set up its discussion forums to serve employees expressing “very different points of view” – this apparently does not extend to all issues.
“I’m concerned that some people are doing that without appreciating the impact their words are having on our Black community,” Zuckerberg is quoted as saying.
And while the Facebook CEO has not commented on these reports, the websites reporting about it are linking it with what’s happening on the company’s front-facing business, namely, its actual social media platform.
And there, more and more pressure is being piled on after the Kenosha incidents to regulate content seen as “hate speech” even more robustly than before.
In the end, the goal of the reports seems to be to suggest that Facebook employees are getting increasingly critical of Zuckerberg for not cracking down hard enough.
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