A Facebook software engineer has resigned from the company because of the social media giant’s “profiting off hate in the US and globally.”
In a post on Workplace, Facebook’s internal employee platform, Ashok Chandwaney posted a 1300-word document detailing his outrage at the company.
Chandwaney shot at many of Facebook’s values, including “Be Bold”, “Focus on Impact”, and “Build Social Value”.
“To me being bold means seeing something that's hard to do but, knowing it’s the right thing to do” Chandwaney wrote, “not … taking a pass on implementing the recommendations from organised civil rights advocates … and even our own civil rights auditors - as we have done”.
Facebook had recently been the subject of a boycott from numerous advertisers as well as the Anti-Defamation League, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the Color Of Change.
They argued that Facebook has not done enough to “call out Holocaust denial as hate” and is “actively choosing not to do so”.
Facebook’s algorithm was recently criticised for promoting holocaust denial.
“Violent hate groups and far-right militias are out there, and they’re using Facebook to recruit and radicalise people who will go on to commit violent hate crimes. So where’s the metric about this? [Our PR response to #StopHateForProfit on this one didn’t even engage with the question],” Chandwaney continued.
He also criticised Facebook’s “lack of openness”, and said it was not doing enough to stop hate on its platform.
This included giving the far right publication Breitbart a “pass on our misinformation policies” and that the “company’s response was to hide the receipts”
Another Facebook employee had stepped down after publishing information that stated “all misinformation strikes against Breitbart’s page and against their domain cleared without explanation” by Facebook employees.
High level Facebook executives also reportedly intervened on behalf of other right-wing publishers.
“Our dishonesty about the Kenosha shootings is similarly … not very open” Chandwaney also wrote.
The engineer criticised Facebook as a means to build social value, saying that “the meaning of this value escapes” him and that “decisions have actually come down to business value.”
“I do assume – as required by policy – best intent of all my coworkers including leadership. It’s just, I can’t point to facts that substantiate that assumption when looking at our repeated failures to confront the hate and violence occuring and being organized on platform” the engineer concludes.
“We don’t benefit from hate," a Facebook spokesperson told The Independent in a statement.
“We invest billions of dollars each year to keep our community safe and are in deep partnership with outside experts to review and update our policies. This summer we launched an industry leading policy to go after QAnon, grew our fact-checking program, and removed millions of posts tied to hate organizations — over 96 per cent of which we found before anyone reported them to us.”
