Why Did Facebook Fire a Top Executive? Hint: It Had Something to Do with Trump

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/why-did-facebook-fire-a-top-executive-hint-it-had-something-to-do-with-trump/ar-BBPAcC5

by grej • 8 years ago

13 8 8 years ago

msn.com

np_tedious• 8 years ago

Can't stand Trump, but this is not ok

mcv• 8 years ago

I agree. I wouldn't put him in charge of a project that's trying to fight fake news being spread on Facebook, but other than that, a person's political belief should be able to remain a private matter. As long as it doesn't affect his role in the company, I suppose.

dreta2• 8 years ago

In a clearly biased environment like Facebook everything is "Fake News".

dreta2• 8 years ago

Nice to have this on paper, but I'm fairly sure everybody knew this already.

It's scary that people like Luckey or Thiel aren't immune to political persecution in Silicon Valley. Can't imagine how oppressive the environment has to be for the regular folk.

BenMorganIO• 8 years ago

I know some comments are saying that political views should not get in the way of one's role at a company, but it looks like a lot of people at Facebook, the smaller people, were pressuring the executives to let Luckey go.

Mr. Luckey’s donation and the perception that he might be associated with a group that at times traded in misogynistic and white-supremacist messages, as some news stories reported, ignited a firestorm. Facebook employees expressed anger about Mr. Luckey on internal message boards and at a weekly town hall meeting in late September 2016, questioning why he was still employed, according to people familiar with the complaints.
“Multiple women have literally teared up in front of me in the last few days,” an engineering director, Srinivas Narayanan, wrote in one internal post following the meeting. Mr. Narayanan didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Some virtual-reality-game developers said they wouldn’t work with Oculus in the future.

If I were an executive, I would have let him go. An executive cannot let female employees feel unsafe and cannot have employees asking "Why is this person still here?" A single person cannot make other developers avoid projects no matter who they are.

malvosenior• 8 years ago

If I were an executive and an employee came to me literally crying because one of their coworkers had a political opinion they didn't like, I would tell that person that it was none of their business and that they were acting inappropriately by injecting their politics into their work. If they continued to make problems, I'd let them go.

I wouldn't allow my company to become a political battleground and ethically I would feel it was the right thing to do (even if more people were upset).

wilde• 8 years ago

Executives don’t have private lives. They are corporate avatars, and their actions are inevitably cast back on the organization. Zuckerberg built a business on encouraging people to move private conversations into the public sphere, so he’s likely keenly aware of this. Associating the Oculus brand with r/The_Donald was probably not one of the PR goals for that quarter so it makes sense that this was a business problem that is relevant professionally.

What surprised me more in this piece was that he supposedly forced Luckey to sign a statement that was clearly factually wrong? That just seems like a way to extend the PR cycle. I suspect Luckey tried to have it both ways and got caught but I guess the court case will figure it out.

rurban• 8 years ago

Comparable to Renaissance firing Bob Mercer. Looks ugly, but it probably cost them business they feared to loose.

Why Did Facebook Fire a Top Executive? Hint: It Had Something to Do with Trump

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