Conservative Facebook employees are organizing to attack the liberal company's 'intolerant' culture
- Conservative Facebook employees are reportedly complaining internally about the company's "intolerant" liberal culture.
- According to The New York Times, more than 100 have joined the internal group "FB'ers for Political Diversity."
- Facebook has grappled with dissenting conservative employees before, and banned an anonymous group used by them in 2016.
More than 100 politically conservative Facebook employees have formed a new internal group to complain that the famously liberal company is "intolerant" of opposing political thought, according to a report from The New York Times on Tuesday.
The new group, "FB'ers for Political Diversity," was reportedly created in the last week, and came after senior Facebook engineer Brian Amerige wrote in an internal post viewable only by company employees that "we are a political monoculture that's intolerant of different views ... we claim to welcome all perspectives, but are quick to attack - often in mobs - anyone who presents a view that appears to be in opposition to left-leaning ideology."
Amerige and Facebook did not immediately respond to Business Insider's requests for comment.
Silicon Valley, the heart of the American tech industry, is largely liberal, and has been fraught with allegations of bias in Trump's America.
In July 2017, Google found itself at the centre of a political firestorm after engineer James Damore wrote an internal post decrying what he characterised as "Google's Ideological Echo Chamber," in which he attacked the company's diversity efforts. Some conservatives also allege, without proof, that social media firms are deliberately silencing and censoring non-liberal voices on their platforms.
On Tuesday, President Trump accused Google, without providing evidence, of "silencing" conservative news publications in its search results.
Facebook has grappled with how to approach dissent by conservative employees before. As Business Insider previously reported in 2017, a group called "Facebook Anon" where employees could chat anonymously morphed into a hub for conservative, Trump-supporting employees during the 2016 election. It was ultimately shut down in December 2016 as the talk "turned ugly and ... alarmed management."
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