‘Virtual Walkingout’ stage of Facebook staff following the response from Zuckerberg to the post of Trump

On Monday, Facebook employees made clear their will to censor President Donald Trump from the Social Media Giant.

The New York Times confirmed that hundreds of workers had been going out the ‘internet retreat’ to protest the decision taken by CEO Mark Zuckerberg to manage the President’s comments.

The protest came after last week’s social media surveillance interview with Fox News by Zuckerberg.

He told Fox News Dana Perino in an interview, which aired Thursday. “We have a different policy on this than I think Twitter.

“I genuinely believe the reality of what people post publicly can not be a Facebook arbiter,” Zuckerberg said. “Private companies should probably not be in a position to do that, particularly those platform companies.”

The employees also refused to work, in addition to pressuring Facebook managers to take a tougher stand against Trump’s posts. They showed support for people from all over the country, protesting George Floyd’s May 25 death under custody in Minneapolis.

The group wants to see Facebook censorship or add warning labels to the posts of the President, just like Twitter did for a tweet on 28 May.

After commenters said the phrase “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” has racially charged origins and was used by segregationists in the ’60s, the president clarified his statement. “It was spoken as a fact, not as a statement,” Trump said in a tweet Friday.

“It’s very simple, nobody should have any problem with this other than the haters, and those looking to cause trouble on social media. Honor the memory of George Floyd!” ….It was spoken as a fact, not as a statement.

It’s very simple, nobody should have any problem with this other than the haters, and those looking to cause trouble on social media. Honor the memory of George Floyd! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 29, 2020

Regardless, the Twitter warnings remain on the tweet. The president posted the same message on Facebook, where it has received no such censoring. Do you agree with Facebook’s approach to President Trump’s posts? According to audio from a Tuesday Q&A video call meeting with thousands of employees that was leaked to Vox Media’s Recode, Zuckerberg explained why he refused to take the post down.

“I knew that the stakes were very high on this, and knew a lot of people would be upset if we made the decision to leave it up,” he said. “We basically concluded after the research and after everything I’ve read and all the different folks that I’ve talked to that the reference is clearly to aggressive policing — maybe excessive policing — but it has no history of being read as a dog whistle for vigilante supporters to take justice into their own hands.”

Following Twitter’s censorship of the president’s tweets and a history of bias against conservatives by Big Tech and social media platforms, Trump signed an executive order on Thursday directing federal regulators to crack down on such bias and, in some cases, remove the legal protections shielding tech companies from liability for what’s posted on their platforms.

“In a country that has long cherished the freedom of expression, we cannot allow a limited number of online platforms to hand pick the speech that Americans may access and convey on the internet,” the executive order says.

“This practice is fundamentally un-American and anti-democratic. “When large, powerful social media companies censor opinions with which they disagree, they exercise a dangerous power. They cease functioning as passive bulletin boards, and ought to be viewed and treated as content creators.”

President @realDonaldTrump just took executive action to fight online censorship by tech corporations, including social media platforms. pic.twitter.com/W4r7vLw958 — The White House (@WhiteHouse) May 28, 2020

“The choices that Twitter makes when it chooses to suppress, edit, blacklist, shadow-ban are editorial decisions, pure and simple,” Trump said at the signing. “In those moments, Twitter ceases to be a neutral public platform and they become an editor with a viewpoint, and I think we can say that about others also, whether you’re looking at Google, whether you’re looking at Facebook and perhaps others,” he said.