Facebook Shut Down Employee Chat Room Over Harassing Messages -- Update
August 16 2017 - 9:15PM
Dow Jones News
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.
For example, many employees had criticized Mr. Zuckerberg's
decision to leave up Mr. Trump's Facebook posts about banning
Muslims from entering the U.S., even though the posts qualified as
hate speech under Facebook's content guidelines.
Facebook executives, including Mr. Zuckerberg, have tried to
cultivate ideological diversity within the company, especially
after a May 2016 report said curators of Facebook's "trending
topics" feature suppressed news from conservative sources.
The decision to disable anonymous posting came in the wake of
last year's presidential election, which sparked debate among the
company's liberal employees, many of whom openly lamented
Facebook's failure to uproot fabricated news articles in the run-up
to the election, the people said.
Built by Facebook employees as a side project a couple of years
ago, FB Anon became a forum for Facebook employees to air
grievances or share information that could get them in trouble.
One year, someone shared on FB Anon a spreadsheet with detailed
compensation information across Facebook, sparking an internal
controversy over pay differences between technical and nontechnical
employees, some of the people familiar said.
Last year, some posts within FB Anon said code written by women
was rejected more often than code written by men because Facebook
lowers the bar for female engineers so it can improve its diversity
numbers, one of the people said. The comment was in response to
debate on FB Anon about a female engineer's analysis showing a
discrepancy in code rejections by gender. Facebook rejected the
engineer's conclusion after doing its own assessment.
One casualty of the disabling of anonymous posting was a second
anonymous page, meant for women and minorities to air grievances
without retribution. It contained few offensive posts, others
said.
Some details of the anonymous forums were first reported by news
site Business Insider.
Write to Deepa Seetharaman at Deepa.Seetharaman@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
August 16, 2017 21:00 ET (01:00 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2017 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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