A Black Facebook employee, joined by two others who were denied jobs at the social network, has filed a complaint against the company, saying it discriminates against Black workers and applicants in hiring, evaluations, promotions and pay.
The complaint comes in the same week as an advertiser boycott continues to grow over hate speech concerns.
The charge was filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission by Oscar Veneszee, Jr., who has worked as an operations program manager at Facebook since 2017 and claims he has not been fairly evaluated or promoted despite his “excellent performance” at the company. Two others joined Veneszee’s complaint, saying they were unlawfully denied jobs at the company despite being qualified.
Facebook said in a statement it takes discrimination allegations seriously and investigates every case.
“We believe it is essential to provide all employees with a respectful and safe working environment,” said spokeswoman Pamela Austin.
Black workers account for 3.8% of all U.S. Facebook employees and 1.5% of all U.S. technical workers at the company. Those numbers have barely budged over the past several years, a common pattern across large Silicon Valley firms.
This isn’t the first criticism a Black employee has leveled at Facebook. Mark Luckie, who left the company in 2018, sent a memo to his coworkers on his last day — also posted on Facebook — that chronicled what he called Facebook’s “black people problem.”
“Facebook’s disenfranchisement of black people on the platform mirrors the marginalization of its black employees,” Luckie wrote. “In my time at the company, I’ve heard far too many stories from black employees of a colleague or manager calling them ‘hostile’ or ‘aggressive’ for simply sharing their thoughts in a manner not dissimilar from their non-Black team members.”
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According to Veneszee’s complaint, filed on Thursday, “people of color and Black workers in particular remain underrepresented at all levels of Facebook and especially at the management and leadership levels. They do not feel respected or heard. And they do not believe that Black workers have an equal opportunity to advance their careers at Facebook.”
While there may be Black Lives Matter posters on Facebook’s walls, the complaint says, “Black workers don’t see that phrase reflecting how they are treated in Facebook’s own workplace.”
Ad boycott grows
On Wednesday, more than 500 companies officially kicked off an advertising boycott intended to pressure Facebook into taking a stronger stand against hate speech. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has agreed to meet with its organizers early next week.
But whether Zuckerberg agrees to further tighten the social network’s carefully crafted rules probably boils down to a more fundamental question: Does Facebook need big brand advertisers more than the brands need Facebook?
In a broad sense, the current boycott, which will last at least a month, is like nothing Facebook has experienced before. Following weeks of protests against police violence and racial injustice, major brands have for the first time joined together to protest still-prevalent hate speech on Facebook’s platforms by taking aim at the social network’s $70 billion in annual ad revenue.
After years of piecemeal measures to address hate, abuse and misinformation on its service, Facebook’s critics hope that pinching the company where it hurts will push it toward more meaningful change. As of Wednesday, 530 companies have signed on — and that’s not counting businesses like Target and Starbucks, which have paused advertising but did not formally join the “Stop Hate for Profit” campaign, which calls its action a “pause” rather than a boycott.
“Many businesses told us how they had been ignored when asking Facebook for changes,” campaign organizers wrote in a letter to advertisers this week. “Together, we finally got Facebook’s attention.”
But Facebook’s already-tarnished public image may sustain more damage than its business. If the ad pause lasts one month, Citi Investment Research analyst Jason Bazinet estimates, the likely impact on Facebook’s stock will be $1 per share. Based on Wednesday’s closing price of $237.92, that’s a decline of less than half a percent.
If the businesses extend their boycott indefinitely, Bazinet suggests the likely impact would be $17 a share, or about a 7% decline. That’s less than the 8% drop Facebook shares sustained on Friday after global consumer-products maker Unilever said it would pause advertising on Facebook and Instagram for the rest of the year.
Also, Facebook shares have already bounced back from that dip.
On Wednesday, Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs and communications, tried to reassure businesses that Facebook “does not benefit from hate” and said the company has every incentive to remove hate speech from its service. He acknowledged that “many of our critics are angry about the inflammatory rhetoric President Trump has posted on our platform and others, and want us to be more aggressive in removing his speech.”
Clegg, however, offered few concessions, and instead repeated Zuckerberg’s frequent talking point that “the only way to hold the powerful to account is ultimately through the ballot box.” He pointed to Facebook’s get-out-the-vote efforts as evidence of the company’s commitment, along with the billions of dollars, tens of thousands of content moderators and other investments it has made in trying to improve its platform.
Facebook bans ‘boogaloo’ group
Also this week, Facebook banned an extremist anti-government network loosely associated with the broader “boogaloo” movement, a slang term supporters use to refer to a second Civil War or a collapse of civilization.
But the platform didn’t try to name the group, underscoring the difficulty of grappling with an amorphous network linked to a string of domestic terror plots that appears to obfuscate its existence. Among other complications, its internet-savvy members tend to keep their distance from one another, frequently change their symbols and catch phrases and mask their intentions with sarcasm.
The move by Facebook designates this group as a dangerous organization similar to the Islamic State group and white supremacists, both of which are already banned from its service. The social network is not banning all references to “boogaloo” and said it is only removing groups, accounts and pages when they have a “clear connection to violence or a credible threat to public safety.”
The loose movement is named after “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo,” a 1984 sequel to a movie about breakdancing. “Boogaloo” supporters have shown up at protests over COVID-19 lockdown orders, carrying rifles and wearing tactical gear over Hawaiian shirts — themselves a reference to “big luau,” a homophone for “boogaloo” sometimes favored by group members. Facebook said the movement dates back to 2012 and that it has been tracking it closely since last year.
Earlier in June, Steven Carrillo, an Air Force sergeant with ties to the boogaloo movement, fatally shot a federal security officer and wounded his partner outside a U.S. courthouse, ambushed and killed a California sheriff’s deputy and injured four other officers in Oakland, California. According to the criminal complaint, Carrillo posted in a Facebook group, “It’s on our coast now, this needs to be nationwide. It’s a great opportunity to target the specialty soup bois. Keep that energy going.”
The statement was followed by two fire emojis and a link to a YouTube video showing a large crowd attacking two California Highway Patrol vehicles. According to the FBI “soup bois” may be a term that followers of the boogaloo movement used to refer to federal law enforcement agents.
While the “boogaloo'” term has been embraced by white supremacist groups and other far-right extremists, many supporters insist they aren’t racist or truly advocating for violence.
