News: August 2018 Archives
With serendipitous timing we learn that Brian Amerige, a senior Facebook engineer, has written an internal post about the company's lack of political diversity. Of course we all remember the outcry when Google engineer James Damore wrote a similar thesis a year ago and was quickly fired, but this time the writing was leaked just as President Trump has been denouncing the company and barely a week before Facebook's COO is scheduled to testify before the Senate.
The dispute over employees' political ideology arose a week before Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, is scheduled to testify at a Senate hearing about social media manipulation in elections. A team helping Ms. Sandberg get ready for the hearing next Wednesday has warned her that some Republican lawmakers may raise questions about Facebook and biases, according to two people involved in the preparations.On Tuesday, Mr. Trump again brought up the issue of bias by tech companies with tweets attacking Google. In remarks later in the day, he widened his focus to include Twitter and Facebook.
Those companies "better be careful because you can't do that to people," Mr. Trump said. "I think that Google, and Twitter and Facebook, they are really treading on very, very troubled territory and they have to be careful. It is not fair to large portions of the population."
So will Amerige be fired? I predict not, but oh the wailing and gnashing of teeth.
