Facebook workers critical of Zuckerberg's handling of Trump

Facebook employees have criticized Mark Zuckerberg’s inaction against President Donald Trump’s ‘crude’ comments. Yahoo Finance’s On The Move panel weighs in.

Video Transcript

JULIE HYMAN: All of this also-- the debate that we have been talking-- has been playing out on social media, as we know. And we also know that various senior Facebook employees have been expressing their dismay at Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's decision not to take more action, stronger action on comments from President Trump and others that they consider to be incendiary.

Dan Howley, I wanted to ask you about this story. How unusual is it to see this kind of intransigence at a place like Facebook go public?

DAN HOWLEY: For something like Facebook, it's new. This isn't something that we've really seen before. We've seen employees speak out at other tech companies, but the level of these employees-- these are, you know, executives that can get direct access or do have direct access to Mark Zuckerberg, and they are basically saying, look, we completely disagree with his handling of the situation, and we think that he should have taken the post down or should have put some kind of notification on it.

It's worth pointing out that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the congresswoman from New York, she had asked Zuckerberg point blank during hearings whether or not they would take down or put comments or some kind of notification on posts that kind of glorify violence like Twitter says Trump's original tweet was, and he said he would.

So this is obviously completely goes against his prior statements on this. And, you know, the fact that these employees are speaking out is similar to what we've seen at companies like Google and Amazon, but this is really the first time we're seeing it fully at Facebook.

ADAM SHAPIRO: What are the ramifications for Facebook, for Zuckerberg? I mean, it's not as if the Democrats don't have issues with Zuckerberg as well on Capitol Hill.

DAN HOWLEY: Yeah. I mean, you know, and it's interesting because he's been courting the-- you know, well, all social-media companies have-- and tech companies have been courting the conservatives in Congress to kind of ensure they don't do anything to section 230. Twitter obviously was the company to kind of say forget it. We have to make some kind of move here against the president's tweet.

So I think the only thing that really they can hit them with is a potential change to 230 if Congress gets behind that. But I think for the social-media companies in general, specifically Facebook, their bigger issue is the antitrust investigations that are ongoing.

So I think this is kind of an existential threat if this eventually does come to 230 changing at some point. But, really, I don't see it going anywhere, and I think the greater issue is still those antitrust issues.

RICK NEWMAN: Hey, Dan. The way I think I think about Facebook's position on this, what to do about troublesome content, is they do not want this to be something that human beings have to deal with. They want a software or an algorithm that can do it, and it's just a very hard for algorithms to do it. Do you think Zuckerberg's resistance comes from just not wanting to basically have to hire an army of fact checkers?

DAN HOWLEY: I mean, they did have contracts with third-party fact checkers like Snopes before. But, you know, that's what they were relying on for fact checking some of the content that's on their site. And, you know, they were doing a decent job of that, but I think that contract may have lapsed.

And, you know, I think it really speaks to Zuckerberg's fear of evoking Trump's wrath. And, you know, regardless of the fact that he hasn't done anything on Facebook to his-- you know, to Trump's comments, he would still be threatened by any kind of change to section 230. And I think anything that would happen to Twitter would instantly fall down on Facebook as well just because they're in the same industry.

So I'm sure he's very mad at Jack Dorsey for making the moves that he did, and I think Jack Dorsey is able to sit there and say that he has the moral high ground for now. But don't forget that Twitter has its own problems and has had its own problems with disinformation campaigns from states like Russia and Iran and China. So they all have their own issues.

I think this is basically Jack Dorsey, though, kind of trying to say, look, nobody is above our guidelines.

JULIE HYMAN: Dan Howley, thank you. I'm sure this is not the last we will be hearing about this. For what it's worth, Twitter and Facebook shares, by the way, are both trading higher today.