This is the story of those two years, as they played out inside and around the company. In ways that are only fully visible now, it set the stage for the most tumultuous two years of Facebook’s existence-triggering a chain of events that would distract and confuse the company while larger disasters began to engulf it. The post went viral, but the ensuing battle over Trending Topics did more than just dominate a few news cycles. Within a few hours the piece popped onto half a dozen highly trafficked tech and politics websites, including Drudge Report and Breitbart News. Then, in early May, he published an article based on conversations with yet a third former Trending Topics employee, under the blaring headline “Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News.” The piece suggested that Facebook’s Trending team worked like a Fox News fever dream, with a bunch of biased curators “injecting” liberal stories and “blacklisting” conservative ones. He soon published a story about the internal poll showing Facebookers’ interest in fending off Trump. The firing of Fearnow and Villarreal set the Trending Topics team on edge-and Nuñez kept digging for dirt. Sign up for the Daily newsletter and never miss the best of WIRED. And on Facebook, a popular group called Blacktivist was gaining traction by blasting out messages like “American economy and power were built on forced migration and torture.” Hillary Clinton had just defeated Bernie Sanders in Nevada, only to have an activist from Black Lives Matter interrupt a speech of hers to protest racially charged statements she’d made two decades before. ![]() Donald Trump had just won the South Carolina primary, lashed out at the Pope over immigration, and earned the enthusiastic support of David Duke. But “crossing out something means silencing speech, or that one person’s speech is more important than another’s.” The defacement, he said, was being investigated.Īll around the country at about this time, debates about race and politics were becoming increasingly raw. “We’ve never had rules around what people can write on our walls,” the memo went on. “ ‘Black Lives Matter’ doesn’t mean other lives don’t,” he wrote. On at least a couple of occasions, someone had crossed out the words “Black Lives Matter” and replaced them with “All Lives Matter.” Zuckerberg wanted whoever was responsible to cut it out. ![]() His message pertained to some walls at the company’s Menlo Park headquarters where staffers are encouraged to scribble notes and signatures. One day in late February of 2016, Mark Zuckerberg sent a memo to all of Facebook’s employees to address some troubling behavior in the ranks.
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