Conservative Facebook employees join group protesting ‘intolerant’ culture

Facebook
CEO Mark Zuckerberg
REUTERS/Leah
Milli

• Conservative Facebook employees are reportedly
  complaining internally about the company’s “intolerant” liberal
  culture.
• According to The New York Times, more than 100 have
  joined the internal group “FB’ers for Political
  Diversity.”
• Facebook has grappled with dissenting conservative
  employees before, and banned an anonymous group used by them in
  2016.

More than 100 politically conservative Facebook
employees have formed a new internal group to complain that the
famously liberal company is “intolerant” of opposing political
thought,
according to a report from The New York Times on Tuesday.

The new group, “FB’ers for Political Diversity,” was reportedly
created in the last week, and came after senior Facebook engineer
Brian Amerige wrote in an internal post viewable only by company
employees that “we are a political monoculture that’s intolerant
of different views … 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 and Facebook did not immediately respond to Business
Insider’s requests for comment.

Silicon Valley, the heart of the American tech industry, is
largely liberal, and has been fraught with allegations of bias in
Trump’s America.

In July 2017, Google found itself at the centre of a political
firestorm after engineer James Damore wrote an internal post
decrying what he characterised as “Google’s Ideological Echo
Chamber,” in which he attacked the company’s diversity efforts.
Some conservatives also allege, without proof, that social media
firms are deliberately silencing and censoring non-liberal voices
on their platforms.

On Tuesday, President Trump accused Google, without providing
evidence, of
“silencing” conservative news publications in its search
results.

Facebook has grappled with how to approach dissent by
conservative employees before.
As Business Insider previously reported in 2017, a group
called “Facebook Anon” where employees could chat anonymously
morphed into a hub for conservative, Trump-supporting employees
during the 2016 election. It was ultimately shut down in December
2016 as the talk “turned ugly and … alarmed management.”

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