When democracy dies, history will show that Mark Zuckerberg fired the kill shot.
Disguised in free-speech garb and a haircut that I have to believe is some sort of homage to the serpentine king in the movie Gladiator, Zuckerberg has, for years, weaponized the First Amendment as a way to abandon his responsibility as the arbiter of information. His Manhattan project — Facebook — has for some time now become a training center for propagating misinformation. Once a place “to connect with friends,” today, everyone knows that Facebook is a place to incite violence under the guise of that most vital American tenant — freedom of speech.
It’s why Zuckerberg has quickly become one of the president’s most beloved nerdy-looking white guys to host at the White House and pretend that he likes. Most recently, Zuckerberg came to the president’s defense like the good piece of artificial intelligence he is, when he determined that the president need not abide by Facebook’s community standards.
Late last week, as protesters hit the street over the killing of George Floyd by four Minneapolis police officers, the president did what we’ve all come to expect from him, further fanning the flames of violence and hate, posting on Facebook a racist trope from the 1960s: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” While Twitter did the bare minimum by adding a notice stating that this post glorified violence, per a report in the New York Times, Zuckerberg, according to Axios, “got on a call with Mr. Trump and issued what sounded like a mild personal rebuke, even though he also reminded the president that Facebook does not attach warnings to troubling posts on the platform.”
In a Facebook post, Zuckerberg explained his decision to uphold the president’s obvious incitement of violence by responding, “I know many people are upset that we’ve left the President’s posts up, but our position is that we should enable as much expression as possible unless it will cause imminent risk of specific harms or dangers spelled out in clear policies.”
His decision to take the president’s side naturally didn’t sit well with many of his employees. Two quit in the subsequent days and others staged a virtual walkout — logging out for the day in protest.
Its something… but… Virtual walkout? No, quit your damn jobs. I've quit in protest before, and haven't made anywhere near as much as a Facebook employee does. They should have savings for a few months, it should be easy for them. https://t.co/1cJD5Vy3qt
— Cameron (@CameronYeager) June 1, 2020
While this is, perhaps, an extreme example, it’s still a relatable situation for many, and it raises the obvious ethical question: What should you do if your employer fails to live up to your principles? Is quitting the right move, or is it more important to stay and try to force change from within?
The answer, according to Ancella Livers, chief innovation officer at Talent Dimensions, a company that specializes in employee engagement, retention and career development, isn’t as cut-and-dried as you might think. “Let’s say I’m at this company and its behaviors, and just the way it goes about business, aren’t my values,” she explains. “I have to figure out what I’m trying to do. Am I just staying here to remind people that you’re bad people? Am I trying to shift something, and if so, what is the likelihood of my actually shifting it? Am I in the right places at the right times with the right people? Do I have the presence that people are going to hear me? Do I have the presence that people are going to listen to me, or am I sitting out here in the woods yelling in the forest for the next 15 years?”
Livers insists that if you decide to stay and attempt to change your company’s values from the inside, you have to be prepared for the consequences. “Am I going to become a pariah? ‘Oh my God, here comes Ancella again, ugh.’ Right? ‘Make the bad lady go away, she will not shut up.’ And if that’s the case, am I okay with being the pariah?”
In other words, you really have to do some soul searching about what it means to stay to help bring about change from within.
Practically speaking, Amanda Augustine, career advice expert for TopResume, agrees with Livers in the sense that you can certainly voice your concerns with your manager or someone in HR, but there’s no guarantee this will change anything. “If the topic has come up in conversations with some of your colleagues who share the same frustrations, it’s best to coordinate your communication with management,” she says. “If you can’t imagine continuing to work for an organization whose values don’t align with yours, then it may be time to consider a position at another company.”
However, Augustine warns, while actions speak louder than words, it’s always better to secure a new position before quitting your current job, especially in this uncertain economy. “Will one person quitting change a company’s policy — or non-policy — on diversity and inclusion?” says Augustine. “The hard truth is, probably no. But, one person’s actions can inspire others to act, too. Change never occurs if someone isn’t willing to start.”
All of which is to say that there’s no reliable roadmap for making decisions like this. But both Livers and Augustine agree that the consequences of these decisions are different for everyone. “When a senior exec of an organization stands up and leaves on principle, people notice,” says Livers. “Now, again, they’re paying a different kind of price. They’re probably not as worried about being hungry, so it’s a little bit easier to stand up on our principles when the dinner will be there tomorrow. But the publicity and the social capital loss, it can be pretty significant.”
Livers points to the example set by Colin Kaepernick as a case study in how these decisions affect people differently, based on their social standing and the color of their skin. “Here we have ourselves a perfect example in some ways of a person choosing their principles, and he lost a lot,” she says. “He’s got some cash, but the fact is, the thing that he loved, he’s been blackballed from. Pun intended. And so there was a real cost. He paid a price, a significant price.”
But, she says, had the man taking a knee been a white player, the price would have never been as high. “Oh, we’d be mad at him,” she says. “‘I don’t know why Tom Brady went out there and took a knee!’ ‘What’s going on with Tom Brady? Oh my God.’ And then say, ‘You know, that guy can throw. You see how we won that game the other day?’ And after about three or four games, we would have forgotten the ‘ugly knee incident.’ We would have forgiven him.”
In the context of a more typical workplace, she continues, “When the senior executive of color, in this case, walks out, that consequence is going to be different. They might not get another job at that level. Then we lose a senior level person of color. It’s not as easy for them to find another job at that level.”
Which brings us back to the issue at Facebook, where, as mentioned earlier, two white software engineers quit their jobs in protest of Zuckerberg’s decision to not rebuke the president. Livers tells me that the actions of the individuals who left their jobs are commendable, even brave, although it will obviously take more Facebook engineers to leave their desks for any permanent change.
But Livers also wants to be clear that, when those who aren’t people of color stand for what’s right in support of Black people, in many ways, it’s a saving of their own soul, a willingness to see beyond their “privilege that encases this country in diamond facets that cut everything that’s not their own.” “And so, it takes something to stand up and be willing to recognize that what you have isn’t a gift, it’s a privilege,” she says. “It’s not because you’re special. It’s because society is rigged and because so many lives have been pulled for so many people over so many hundreds of years that white folks can have the luxury of not having to speak and of not having to take a knee.”
Andrew Fiouzi
Andrew Fiouzi is a staff writer at MEL.
