Facebook’s ‘Community Standard’

Facebook denies it pushed top exec Palmer Luckey out the door for being publicly pro-Trump, but that’s clearly what happened.

As Monday’s Wall Street Journal reported, Facebook’s internal message boards turned red with fury over Luckey’s 10-grand donation to an anti-Hillary-Clinton group at the height of the 2016 campaign.

According to e-mails the Journal unearthed, top management — apparently all the way up to CEO Mark Zuckerberg — got Luckey to publicly endorse Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, which Silicon Valley could apparently stomach.

But the exec has actually been a Donald Trump fan since reading “Art of the Deal” as a teen: He credits it with inspiring him to become an entrepreneur who co-founded Oculus, the virtual-reality firm that Facebook bought when it brought him in. He even wrote Trump a letter in 2011 urging him to run for president.

And when Luckey said as much to an interviewer, Facebook put him on leave while it “investigated.” Months later, he was fired — albeit with a hefty termination package, as his contract required.

Again, Facebook insists “unequivocally” that “Palmer’s departure was not due to his political views.”

Yet the evidence clearly supports the very different take of another ex-employee, a former senior engineer: Facebook has a “political monoculture that’s intolerant of different views.”