Facebook is facing an ideological rebellion similar to the one Google smashed when it fired contrarian James Damore, who challenged the tech behemoth’s leftist orthodoxy police.
A product engineer at Facebook, Brian Amerige posted a memo accusing the company of intolerance and having a problem with “political diversity,” which quickly hit cyberspace and the New York Times.
The memo surfaced in the Times on August 28, a day before President Trump zinged Google for its bias against him and conservative views in search results.
Memo Author: “We Have a Problem with Political Diversity”
Wrote Amerige, “We are a political monoculture that’s intolerant of different views. We claim to welcome all perspectives, but are quick to attack — often in mobs — anyone who presents a view that appears to be in opposition to left-leaning ideology.”
Calling himself an objectivist, the individualist philosophy of Ayn Rand, Amerige unloaded on the company’s culture and the attitudes of social justice warriors who work for it:
We throw labels that end in *obe and *ist at each other, attacking each other’s character rather than their ideas.
We do this so consistently that employees are afraid to say anything when they disagree with what’s around them politically. HR has told me that this is not a rare concern, and I’ve personally gotten over a hundred messages to that effect. Your colleagues are afraid because they know that they — not their ideas — will be attacked. They know that all the talk of “openness to different perspectives” does not apply to causes of “social justice,” immigration, “diversity”, and “equality.” On this issues, you can either keep quiet or sacrifice your reputation and career.
Even worse, he wrote, “we tear down posters welcoming Trump supporters” and “we ask HR,” the company’s human resources department, “to investigate those who dare to criticize Islam’s human rights record for creating a ‘non inclusive environment.’”
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And “they called me a transphobe when I called out our corporate art for being politically radical.”
In other words, hard, left-wing radicals control Facebook. “This is not OKAY,” Amerige wrote, “for our own viability as a company.”
FBers for Political Diversity
Amerige formed a group called FBers for Political Diversity, which already has 100 members, the Times reported.
Predictably, “the new group has upset other Facebook employees, who said its online posts were offensive to minorities. One engineer, who declined to be identified for fear of retaliation, said several people had lodged complaints with their managers about FBers for Political Diversity and were told that it had not broken any company rules”:
The activity is a rare sign of organized dissent within Facebook over the company’s largely liberal workplace culture. While the new group is just a sliver of Facebook’s work force of more than 25,000, the company’s workers have in the past appeared less inclined than their peers at other tech companies to challenge leadership, and most have been loyalists to its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg.
And how strict are Zuckerberg’s leftist Thought Police?
As the Times, Techcrunch.com, and others reported, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey was forced out of the company after the Daily Beast published a piece exposing him as supporter of President Trump and the brains behind many of the Internet memes “maligning” Hillary Clinton.
Luckey need not worry, at least from a financial standpoint: When Facebook bought his company for $2 billion, he pocketed about $730 million.
Damore and Google
This isn’t the first — and hopefully not the last — conservative insurrection at a tech company. Google is fighting a discrimination lawsuit from James Damore, whom it cashiered after he published a memo about the company’s bias against conservatives.
Titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” the memo challenged many of the radical left’s assumptions and superstitions, not least that men and women are identical biologically and psychologically. Damore argued that the obvious, proven differences between men and women explain why the latter typically earn less money than men.
Among the observations that inspired Google to fire Damore were that women “have more … extraversion expressed as gregariousness rather than assertiveness. Also, higher agreeableness,” he wrote, which “leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading.”
Damore also said women have more “neuroticism,” which “may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs.”
