New disclosures from Facebook to the Securities and Exchanges Commission revealed opinion polls among employees who disagreed with the company's decision not to put a label on former President Donald Trump's post saying "when the looting starts the shooting starts."
According to Slate, the documents revealed charts showing the results from internal surveys over a two-year period, Jan. 2019 to Dec. 2020. Those surveys of employees ask "how optimistic employees felt regarding the company, how confident they were in the executive leadership, how proud they were to work at Facebook, and how much of a social good they felt the platform offered."
The results showed that enthusiasm for the company soared as the pandemic got worse and worse. Slate said that the assumption is that employees were proud about Facebook's place in providing COVID-19 news, promotion of health care workers and advice. In March 2020, the New York Times reported that “big tech could emerge from [the] coronavirus crisis stronger than ever.”
But as the summer came, optimism began to sink, with a sharp decline in Dec. 2020 ahead of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. In an examination of the Facebook Papers, the Washington Post reported Facebook played a role in helping anti-government attackers organize their actions.
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"Though it is difficult to declare causation, the timing across all four charts clearly suggests one turning point: Facebook executives’ inaction on Trump’s 'looting/shooting' post after May 29, 2020," said the report. "These internal surveys demonstrate that Facebook quickly squandered the goodwill it had rebuilt for itself in the early months of the pandemic, very likely due to its ambivalence regarding Trump’s Facebook-supported and -spread rhetoric—especially in comparison with Twitter’s actions for the same post."
Staffers cited in the Facebook Papers show specific examples of the impact of Trump's comments and the company's lack of a response.
"In September 2020, the first results of a survey of Facebook users that 'measures [the] perceived legitimacy' of the platform’s harm-reduction efforts, was published internally to FB’s Integrity team," whistleblower Frances Haugen was part of that team at the time.
The survey showed three "beliefs" that "led to users undermining the legitimacy of Integrity’s work." One even said that “FB is complicit in perpetuating societal harm, including ruining Democracy + offline violence.” It cited the Trump "looting+shooting" post led to the belief. It goes on to give further examples for how Facebook poorly handled the racial issues as more and more people of color were killed or harmed by police.
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One employee even posted a Google document online for anyone with the link detailing their reasons for leaving the company.
"Working on Violence and Incitement throughout the US election year was taxing. We made some decisions during this time, particularly in the months leading up to the election starting in around May, that I vehemently disagree with, and that did make work during this time even more challenging," the employee's document explains. "Trump’s 'Looting and Shooting' post was viewed orders of magnitude times more than the total number of views that we prevent in a day, and it was incitement of violence in the clearest sense of the term. It’s not hard to draw a straight line from that post to actual shootings that took place at protests."
The employee said that they wrote a June post "We're Not Allies Until We Do Something," and that the company agreed, but then did nothing to back it up. It was the same time that Trump posted the "looting/shooting" post. The employee confessed that they had a difficult time looking their Black colleagues in the eye when the system they contribute to is being used to incite violence against them.
So, while Zuckerberg may have had no problems with Trump's call to violence, the employees certainly did and some resigned because of it.
