Facebook engineer quits, says the company “profiting off hate”
“We don’t benefit from hate,” Facebook spokeswoman Liz Bourgeois said.
“ Facebook software engineer Ashok Chandwaney has watched with growing unease as the platform has become a haven for hate. On Tuesday morning, it came time to take a stand.” — first reported by The Washington Post.
“I’m quitting because I can no longer stomach contributing to an organization that is profiting off hate in the US and globally,” Ashok Chandwaney said.
In the latest post, Ashok highlighted several raised concerns on whether the social media giant is taking the problem seriously (handling hate speech).
Chandwaney specifically stated that Facebook’s role in charging up the massacre in Myanmar, and further adds the violence in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Facebook also didn’t remove a Kenosha Guard militia event that called for violence before a fatal shooting at a Wisconsin racial justice protest. Facebook pulled down the page for the militia group after the shooting for violating its rules and said that it didn’t act sooner because of an “operational mistake.”
In May, Facebook left up a post from President Donald Trump that included the remarks “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” because the company determined that it didn’t violate its rules against inciting violence. Twitter, on the other hand, labeled Trump’s tweet with the same remark for breaking its rules against glorifying violence. Facebook’s decision to leave up Trump’s post resulted in some employees staging a rare virtual protest while others left the company, reported by CNET.
“The actions that have been taken are easy and could be interpreted as impactful because they make us look better, rather than impactful because they will make substantive change,” Chandwaney wrote.
“We don’t benefit from hate,” Facebook spokeswoman Liz Bourgeois said. “We invest billions of dollars each year to keep our community safe and are in deep partnership with outside experts to review and update our policies. This summer we launched an industry-leading policy to go after QAnon, grew our fact-checking program, and removed millions of posts tied to hate organizations — over 96% of which we found before anyone reported them to us.”
Many people and Facebook’s employees are praising Ashok Chandwaney’s decision to leave the company.
Here is the Resignation letter (source) that Ashok Chandwaney posted to the company.
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