Conservative Facebook Employees Form Group to Protest Lack of ‘Political Diversity’
A senior Facebook engineer upset many of his colleagues when he posted on Facebook’s internal message board on August 20. Brian Amerige titled his post “We Have a Problem With Political Diversity.” He called for tolerance of viewpoints that aren’t on the left.
Many of his colleagues weren’t happy.
A Political Monoculture
“We are a political monoculture that’s intolerant of different views,” Amerige said. “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.”
Brian Amerige’s Fears
“These are not fears without cause,” Facebook engineer Brian Amerige wrote his colleagues.
“Because we tear down posters welcoming Trump supporters. We regularly propose removing [Peter] Thiel from our board because he supported Trump. We’re quick to suggest firing people who turn out to be misunderstood, and even quicker to conclude our colleagues are bigots.
“We have made ‘All Lives Matter’ a fireable offense. We put Palmer Luckey through a witch hunt because he paid for anti-Hillary ads. We write each other ad-hoc feedback in the PSC tool for having “offensive” ideas.
We ask HR to investigate those who dare to criticize Islam’s human rights record for creating a ‘non inclusive environment.’ And they called me a transphobe when I called out our corporate art for being politically radical.”
People at Facebook talked about “openness to different perspectives,” but they weren’t open to different perspectives when talking about causes like social justice, immigration, diversity, and equality. On these issues, “you can either keep quiet or sacrifice your reputation and career.”
Congress and the president don’t believe Facebook can be fair. Since he joined Facebook six and a half years ago, the problem of ignoring what people outside the company think has gotten far worse.
Ironically, he wants to create a safe space for employees to talk about this. He ended the piece inviting employees to join “FB’ers for Political Diversity.” Over 100 have joined so far. This is a small number of Facebook’s over 25,000 employees. Amerige says on his personal website that he follows the teachings of Ayn Rand.
He only has one rule for the group. “If you attack a person’s character, rather than their ideas, you will be banned.”
The Leadership Objects
According to The New York Times, several employees have already complained about the group. They say it is offensive to minorities. Their managers told them that it had not broken any rules.
The leadership of Facebook mostly gives to Democrats. The company has come under fire in recent years for censoring those on the right who use the platform. Last month, Facebook banned the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
Hostility toward the right has become common at the major tech companies. Google fired an employee for writing an article he thought was anonymous about the left wing bias at the company. James Damore circulated a manifesto complaining about Google’s “ideological echo chamber.” He asserted that women have lower stress tolerances than men. He also said that those on the right are more conscientious. Google said the article violated their code of conduct and spread a harmful gender stereotype.
Pushback
People are pushing back. President Trump jumped into the fray He tweeted about the censorship of the big tech giants.
Social Media Giants are silencing millions of people. Can’t do this even if it means we must continue to hear Fake News like CNN, whose ratings have suffered gravely. People have to figure out what is real, and what is not, without censorship!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 24, 2018
Activist Chris Sevier writing at Conservative Firing Line has drafted legislation to stop the big tech censorship. The Anti-Social Media Censorship Act of 2019 would create a private right of action against a website. It would apply if the censorship is taking place for political or religious reasons.
Follow Rachel on Twitter at Rach_IC
