According to various reports, Facebook these days has just under 50,000 – or just over 45,000 (full-time) employees.
(And we’re here to explore the low, conservative figures)
In any case – a “virtual walkout” staged by dozens of those Facebook workers on Twitter the other day, therefore, should, to say the least, make their boss make the news under any normal circumstances.
But these are not any normal circumstances. And Facebook, with 2 billion+ daily users (reported) is by no means just some “normal social network.”
Instead, it’s a global tech and social network behemoth that’s normalizing often conflicting to nefarious abnormal lockdowns and wholesale censorship that accompanied the coronavirus pandemic, and then this new and overwhelming crisis that is grappling, and crippling the US – that of civil rights protests and violence and riots stemming from those acting and reacting in the wake of the death of George Floyd.
But if you’re The Verge – clearly the “virtual walkout” of a mere fraction of Facebook employees over their CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s decision on Friday not to censor Donald Trump, is still treated as newsworthy.
The Verge leads with saying that the decision to leave up President Trump’s Facebook video was “one of its most controversial content moderation decisions in company history.” Hardly, dude – not if your Facebook account was first created around 2006, anyway.
Anyway – many of us old-timers on the web might be too quick to discard what looks as obvious clickbait that will never make its way back again into reliable news business after making an appearance once – but in this case, we may need to stop and consider what The Verge is doing right now.
Not only is Zuckerberg appearing appropriately (PR)-wise being brow-beaten for daring to utter – on a Friday – that his 2+ billion user company might not agree with the US media market.
No doubt, people cited in the report have genuine grievances to air. We all do in our own way. Walk down any street in the world today in most any country and you will find somebody with some grievance.
So Zuck, either properly announce Facebook for what it wants to be – a global tightly controlled opinion marketplace EVERYWHERE – or don’t even pretend that you care.
