Zuckerberg faces his critics

On Tuesday morning, Mark Zuckerberg held a meeting with employees over video chat to address concerns related to the company’s decision not to take action on some recent posts by President Trump. As I reported on Thursday, the decision sparked an unusual amount of internal dissent among employees, and on Monday it spilled over into public with a virtual walkout of a few hundred employees.

Employees sent me a recording of the Tuesday meeting, and it offers a valuable window into Mark Zuckerberg’s decision-making progress, his planned next steps, and the ongoing dissatisfaction of some employees. My colleague Adi Robertson listened in with me. She wrote:

On some level, the dispute between top executives and the walkout participants is intractable — you either think Trump’s post should have come down, or shouldn’t have. But if you assume there will be many more decisions like this to be made in the run-up to the US presidential election, as I do, it’s valuable to understand how Facebook justifies and communicates its policy decisions. Last week, Trump put the company in a bad position — and if events continue to unfold as they have for the past few days, he’ll likely soon put them into a worse one. Today’s meeting can help us understand how Facebook might react when that happens.

Here are my top takeaways from the roughly 85-minute recording.

At the same time, another employee told me that Zuckerberg’s decision was supported by the majority of the company, but that people who agreed with it were afraid to speak out for fear of appearing insensitive. (An employee who spoke on the call echoed this point.)

How you view the controversy over Trump posts ultimately depends, I think, on how you think the next year is going to play out. Some are predicting a return to equilibrium; others are expecting an ongoing escalation of violent rhetoric. Another way of saying this is that there are optimists and pessimists.

The optimists argue that social media is neither good nor bad, but simply a powerful new tool for society to use. Its misuses get more attention than its positive uses, but those positive uses — such as drawing attention to the murder of an innocent man by police — ultimately outweigh the negative ones. This year might be a particularly fraught moment, the optimists say, but eventually (and maybe even soon!), things will start getting back to normal and we’ll be glad we preserved our free speech traditions so that movements like Black Lives Matter can continue to use these tools for positive ends. Zuckerberg, in this framing, is an optimist.

The pessimists argue that social networks are getting played by bad actors who have gamed it to re-enforce and worsen existing power imbalances. The president, for example, has used these platforms to call on police and the military to “dominate” peaceful protesters and crack down on constitutionally protected gatherings — using his own free speech, coupled with the algorithmic promotion that social platforms to provide, to suppress the free speech of others. The pessimist knows that you can never truly de-platform the president of the United States, but she would rather not help a wealthy and powerful corporation build the megaphone. Especially given that she knows worse posts are to come, and that the collective damage is likely only to increase.

The optimist believes that the long arc of history bends toward justice. The pessimist turns on the TV and sees fascist boots on the ground already, tear-gassing their fellowAmericans. The optimist may have the time and privilege to wait out any civil unrest. The pessimist may not.