Employees and visitors can leave messages on walls like this on the Facebook campus in Menlo Park, Calif. Photo: Jeff Chiu/AP/lomo-photo-effect
After several complaints, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had to tell his employees to stop replacing “Black Lives Matter” with “All Lives Matter” on a wall provided at work for people to express their opinions.
In a note posted to employees on a company announcement page, published by Gizmodo, Zuckerberg says he and several other leaders at the company have previously warned employees against doing this. “I was already very disappointed by this disrespectful behavior before, but after my communication, I now consider this malicious as well,” Zuckerberg writes.
“‘Black lives matter’ doesn’t mean other lives don’t. It’s simply asking that the black community also achieves the justice they deserve,'” Zuckerberg wrote in a company announcement to employees, NPR reported:
“We’ve never had rules around what people can write on our walls — we expect everybody to treat each other with respect. Regardless of the content or location, crossing out something means silencing speech, or that one person’s speech is more important than another’s.”
Like much of Silicon Valley, Facebook has been unable to diversify its workforce and remains heavily white and male.
The Facebook site has been accused of becoming a playground for misogynists and racists, the Guardian reported. “It tries to defend itself by defending the public interest in a free flow of information.”
Companies that want to emulate Uber are likely paying much closer to attention to sexism in their workplaces following CEO Travis Kalanick’s resignation, Fortune reported. It “sends an encouraging message about just how bad sexism is for business—and how seriously some companies are beginning to take that fact.”
Susan Fowler joined Uber as a site reliability engineer in November 2015, and within a few weeks, was receiving sexually explicit emails from a manager on company chat saying he was looking for women to have sex with. The company’s human resources department berated her for keeping email records, and told her it was unprofessional to report things via email to HR. You can read about Fowler’s experiences here:
On my last day at Uber, I calculated the percentage of women who were still in the org. Out of over 150 engineers in the SRE teams, only 3 percent were women.
Fowler published a blog post about her experiences at Uber that inspired #DeleteUber and kicked off the weeks-long investigation that in Kalanick’s leave of absence, Mashable reported.
