Vanita Gupta, Sherrilyn Ifill and Rashad Robinson, the heads of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and Color of Change, blasted Mark Zuckerberg after an hour-long teleconference with the Facebook CEO on Monday night.
Said the three civil rights leaders in a joint statement published by Axios: “He did not demonstrate understanding of historic or modern-day voter suppression and he refuses to acknowledge how Facebook is facilitating Trump’s call for violence against protesters. Mark is setting a very dangerous precedent for other voices who would say similar harmful things on Facebook.”
Robinson told Bloomberg News in an interview after the call: “The problem with my ongoing conversations with Mark, is that I feel like I spent a lot of time, and my colleagues spent a lot of time, explaining to him why these things are a problem, and I think he just very much lacks the ability to understand it. … His employees are outraged. I’ve got outreach from some of them. Saying Black Lives Matter, saying I’m going to give money, but having your policies actually hurt black people, people will know the difference.”
Hundreds of Facebook employees on Monday staged a virtual walkout in protest of the company’s facilitation of Trump’s posts inciting violence.
The NYT reports: “Many of the employees, who said they refused to work in order to show their support for demonstrators across the country, added an automated message to their digital profiles and email responses saying that they were out of the office in a show of protest. The protest group — conducting a virtual ‘walkout’ of sorts since most Facebook employees are working from home because of the coronavirus pandemic — was one of a number of clusters of employees pressing Facebook executives to take a tougher stand on Mr. Trump’s posts.”
