META Meta Platforms Inc

By Deepa Seetharaman 

Facebook Inc. dismantled a popular anonymous discussion board for employees last year that had become a forum for conservative political debate that sometimes degenerated into racist or sexist comments, people familiar with the matter said, a rare move to censor speech internally.

FB Anon, the name of the forum shut down in December and reported on Wednesday, became a hub for employees who backed Donald Trump's candidacy, the people said. Before the election, the group put up posters across campus that read "Trump Supporters Welcome."

But FB Anon also attracted comments that many employees found offensive, the people said. For example, some posts last year said Facebook lowered the bar to attract female engineers to boost its diversity numbers, one of the people said, provoking angry responses from others in the chat room.

"A cornerstone of our culture is being open," said Lori Goler, Facebook's head of people, in a statement Wednesday. "The FB Anon internal Facebook group violated our terms of service, which require people who use Facebook (including our employees) to use an authentic identity on our platform."

In explaining the decision in early 2017, Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg told employees that FB Anon contained harassing messages, according to one of the people.

At the time, Facebook reminded employees that there were other forums where they could discuss confidential matters, but not anonymously.

The disabling of the board illustrates Facebook's struggle to cultivate open, freewheeling debate, while still following company rules of decency to not alienate employees with racist and sexist views. The internal challenges mirror the social-media company's difficulties in policing speech and extremist views on its broader platform, used by more than two billion people a month.

Some employees disagreed with Facebook's move, even if they found some views expressed on FB Anon offensive. There was "lots of information that you would not have had otherwise," one of the people said.

The clampdown on the anonymous forum echoes the recent controversy at Alphabet Inc.'s Google after an engineer was fired for suggesting in a lengthy memo that men are better suited for tech jobs than women. The engineer, James Damore, has said he felt Google suppressed discussion of his views.

Similar to Google, Facebook prides itself on an open culture that welcomes criticism and debate among employees. It is common for Facebook employees to raise difficult topics directly to Mr. Zuckerberg during his weekly question-and-answer sessions and even more so in internal discussion boards, created for employees to discuss topics ranging from the cafeteria food to projects, current and former employees say.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

August 16, 2017 20:39 ET (00:39 GMT)

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