Facebook removed post by ex-manager who said site 'failed' black people
Facebook removed a post from a former employee who accused the company of “failing its black employees and its black users”, saying the memo about racial discrimination violated its “community standards”.
Mark S Luckie, who recently stepped down as strategic partner manager, published the piece on Facebook last week detailing his experiences as a black employee at a tech corporation that largely excludes African Americans, saying the company has also unfairly censored black people on the platform.
Facebook appeared to prove Luckie’s point this week by removing the letter before eventually reinstating it.
“My first reaction was shock that it happened,” Luckie told the Guardian after he saw that Facebook had flagged his post, saying it “goes against” the site’s standards. “Then I kind of wanted to laugh. I’ve been on so many phone calls and email threads with people having this issue … In an ironic twist, I am dealing with this.”
In an interview on Tuesday, Luckie reflected on the intense debate his memo had sparked and the “disappointing” silence from Facebook, which he said was doing little to respond to concerns or address prejudice and exclusion at the company.
“It feels like Facebook can tackle a lot of issues … but when you talk about black people, all of a sudden there is silence,” he said by phone from Atlanta, where he moved after quitting Facebook last month. “There are a lot of black employees who express that they feel the same way. To put out a threeline response that doesn’t have any heft to it, it feels dismissive of an engaged community on Facebook. It’s just sad.”
In his original post, Luckie wrote about black employees being “accosted by campus security”, facing discriminatory comments from managers,
reaching a “dead end” when they go to HR, and being “dissuaded” from participating in black employee groups. He said there were more Black Lives Matter posters than black employees in some buildings.
Facebook, which is battling a range of PR crises, responded with a generic statement last week about efforts to “increase the range of perspectives among those who build our products”. The company’s brief comment did not address Luckie’s specific concerns, including his arguments that the firm’s lack of diversity had contributed to failures on the platform, such as the frequent mislabeling of posts by black users as “hate speech”.
Black employees make up 4% of the Facebook workforce and only 1% of technical roles and 2% of leadership positions.
Luckie said he decided to go public with his letter after he circulated it internally and received no formal response from Facebook. “They work quickly to resolve issues when they are held publicly accountable for them,” he said.
But it was frustrating, he said, that Facebook responded internally and externally with statements by the few black employees in leadership roles: “The image Facebook is projecting is that it’s up to black people to fix the issues that black people didn’t create.”
He added: “The historic language to black employees has been ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’ and ‘be resilient’.” Luckie, 35, said the response to his post had been overwhelming and largely positive, though some within Facebook have been critical of him for going public.
“I was disappointed in my colleagues who sort of dismissed that any of this was happening at Facebook, because it didn’t happen to them,” he said. “If you’re black at Facebook, you’ve had to deal with at least one of the issues that I’ve outlined.”
Luckie said he recognized that his post could cost him future jobs or lead to retaliation, but he added: “I’m willing to make the sacrifice.”
He said it was also validating to hear others share similar stories: “I don’t want to be alone out there in the world discussing this.”
After Facebook notified him that it deleted his post, hours later it said it “took another look” and “restored” it, adding: “We’re sorry for the trouble.”
He said it was yet another reminder of the harmful moderation systems at Facebook, which have repeatedly been exposed as biased against a range of marginalized groups.
“The process that Facebook has is stifling conversation, especially amongst under-represented communities,” Luckie said, adding of his post’s censorship: “It encapsulates all the things that are wrong with this process.”
A Facebook spokesperson, Anthony Harrison, said Luckie’s post did not violate standards, adding: “We are looking into what happened.”
For now, Luckie said he was happy to be removed from Silicon Valley and to relocate to Atlanta.
“My culture is here, my friends are here,” he said. “I’ve seen more black people in the airport that I’ve seen in a whole month at Facebook.”