Facebook’s Zuckerberg defends allowing incendiary Trump speech as top engineer quits

No saving face here.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday stood firmly by his decision to allow President Trump to peddle incendiary rhetoric and misinformation on the social media platform, even as employees challenged him in a company-wide video call.

On Monday a top Facebook software engineer quit over what he said was Zuckerberg’s failure to police Trump’s incitements to violence.

“I’m resigning from my job at Facebook,” Timothy Aveni, whose job is to prevent the spread of misinformation on Facebook, wrote in a post on both that platform and on LinkedIn Monday. “For years, President Trump has enjoyed an exception to Facebook’s Community Standards; over and over he posts abhorrent, targeted messages that would get any other Facebook user suspended from the platform. He’s permitted to break the rules, since his political speech is ‘newsworthy.’ ”

The line for Aveni was “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” which Trump spouted by way of threatening the thousands of people thronging the streets to protest the death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer. The phrase echoes comments by a Miami police chief speaking about 1960s civil rights protests.

“Mark always told us that he would draw the line at speech that calls for violence,” Aveni said. “He showed us on Friday that this was a lie.”

Zuckerberg keeps “finding excuse after excuse not to act on increasingly dangerous rhetoric,” Aveni wrote. “Since Friday, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand and process the decision not to remove the racist, violent post Trump made Thursday night, but Facebook, complicit in the propagation of weaponized hatred, is on the wrong side of history.”

He said Trump’s words go beyond the definition of free speech.

“I cannot keep excusing Facebook’s behavior,” Aveni said. “Facebook is providing a platform that enables politicians to radicalize individuals and glorify violence, and we are watching the United States succumb to the same kind of social media-fueled division that has gotten people killed in the Philippines, Myanmar, and Sri Lanka. I’m scared for my country and I’m done trying to justify this.”

Those are countries in which political leaders have spread disinformation through Facebook and WhatsApp, which Facebook owns, that led to intense violence, possibly all the way up to genocide, Huffington Post reported.

The software engineer, one of the employees responsible for quelling the spread of disinformation on the platform, was just one of many employees dissatisfied at Zuckerberg’s apparent double standard when it came to Trump’s content.

Aveni, signing off with the hashtag Black Lives Matter, said his last day will be June 12.

About 25,000 employees tuned in to Tuesday’s staff Q&A with Zuckerberg, reported Vox site Recode, many sharply criticizing his decision to let Trump’s words go unchallenged.

“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,” Zuckerberg said on the call, which Recode listened to. “The right action for where we are right now is to leave this up.”

On Monday 400 employees staged a virtual walkout, Recode said.

“I stand with my fellow Facebook employees today, calling on our leadership to #TakeAction,” software engineer Brandon Dail tweeted Monday. “Facebook’s recent decision to not act on posts that incite violence ignores other options to keep our community safe. It’s crystal clear today that leadership refuses to stand with us.”

But other employees still saw words like Trump’s as protected.

“Supporting free speech — especially when you vehemently disagree with what the person is saying — is a hard but important stance needed to make sure everyone can have a voice,” an employee told CNN.

Twitter, on the other hand, has started labeling Trump’s tweets with warnings about their violent nature.

Trump vows ‘big action!’ against social media after Twitter flags his claims as ‘misleading’

“I work at Facebook, and I am not proud of how we’re showing up,” tweeted Jason Toff, a product-management director at Facebook, according to the Associated Press. “The majority of coworkers I’ve spoken to feel the same way. We are making our voice heard.”