Conservative Facebook Employees Form Group To Fight ‘Political Monoculture’
The Independent reports that a post quietly went up on Facebook’s internal message board for employee’s last week. It was titled “We Have A Problem With Political Diversity,” and it quickly gained traction in the social network.
Over a hundred Facebook employees have joined the group which was formed to criticize the organization for having a “political monoculture.” The company has also been criticized by conservative politicians, including President Trump, who believe it has a left-wing bias.
Brian Amerige, a senior Facebook engineer, posted, “We are a political monoculture that’s intolerant of different views. We claim to welcome all perspectives, but we are quick to attack — often in mobs — anyone who presents a view that appears to be in opposition to left-leaning ideology.”
Since the post was written, over 100 Facebook employees have joined the group. Facebook currently has more than 25,000 employees. According to two individuals who saw the group’s page but aren’t authorized to speak about it publicly, the group is calling itself FB’ers for Political Diversity. According to Amerige’s post, the point is to create room for ideological diversity for employees of the company.
However, some employees have said the posts are offensive to minorities. One employee, who declined to be identified, said several people made complaints with their managers about the group but were told the group hadn’t broken any company rules.
But over the last few years, the social media company has had a series of crises, including the spread of false information by Russians on its website and the misuse of users’ information. Politicians have also accused the company of censoring conservative speech.
Many employees have repeatedly asked for guidance on what content Facebook allows and doesn’t allow on the site, and why. This month, Facebook, along with other platforms, banned far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, which is a move that many see as evidence that the company has an anti-conservative bias.
Facebook is not the only company that has been accused of having a bias against conservatives. Inquisitr reported President Trump recently tweeted he believes Google is rigging search results about him to only show negative results.
But despite the claims from conservatives that social media companies are censoring conservative posts, right-wing content from sites like Breitbart have been very successful on social media. According to Mashable, a 2017 analysis by the social media monitoring company NewsWhip, liberal websites only see half the engagement that conservative websites do.
