Following an avalanche of criticism and a company walkout, Facebook Inc. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg still will not submit to pressure regarding his decision not to take down President Donald Trump’s controversial comment.

Last week when Trump posted the comment “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” regarding the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, he may not have been aware that he had written perhaps his most inflammatory and divisive comment to date. That’s quite a feat for a man whose Twitter feed sometimes reads like the outside of a graffitied subway car.

Twitter Inc. soon labeled the missive as “glorifying violence,” while Zuckerberg took no action at all — in his own words, in the interests of transparency and free speech. That led a number of high-ranking employees at the company to denounce their boss publicly, saying when posts incite violence, they should be taken off the platform.

Zuckerberg had originally planned to have a virtual meeting with employees on Thursday, but it seems in the interests of calming storm before it got out of hand, Zuckerberg moved the meeting to earlier Tuesday. Some media, including The New York Times, got ahold of the minutes of the meeting.

Zuckerberg maintained that Facebook’s principles espouse free speech and that the company “is to leave this up,” referring to the loot/shoot comment. He told staff that he was well aware that by not expunging the president’s words, Facebook would come under a lot of criticism.

Not only that, the chief said that last Friday he received a call from Trump and during that call Zuckerberg apparently chastened the president but said the comment did not transgress Facebook’s policies. “I used that opportunity to make him know I felt this post was inflammatory and harmful, and let him know where we stood on it,” Zuckerberg said to staff.

“I knew that I needed to separate out my personal opinion, from what our policy is and the principles of the platform we’re running are — knowing that the decision that we made was going to lead to a lot of people being very upset inside the company and a lot of the media criticism we’re going to get,” Zuckerberg went on. “Likely this decision has incurred a massive practical cost for the company to do what we think is the right step.”

He reiterated that free expression should be allowed on the platform unless content could be deemed to cause specific harm to a person or persons. He did add, though, that if civil unrest in the U.S. goes on, then Facebook may have to think about labeling certain posts.

Some employees wholeheartedly disagree with their boss, with two of them publicly resigning over the matter. Software engineer Timothy Aveni said on his LinkedIn page that he could no longer work at a company that is “complicit in the propagation of weaponized hatred.”

In a post on Facebook, Aveni said Trump’s “abhorrent” posts should not be allowed on the platform just because they are “newsworthy.”  He added that Zuckerberg’s contention that content could remain on the platform as long as it was not dangerous had just been proved to be a lie.

“I cannot keep excusing Facebook’s behavior,” Aveni wrote. “Facebook is providing a platform that enables politicians to radicalize individuals and glorify violence, and we are watching the United States succumb to the same kind of social media-fueled division that has gotten people killed in the Philippines, Myanmar, and Sri Lanka. I’m scared for my country and I’m done trying to justify this.”

Another employee to leave the company was Owen Anderson.

“I am proud to announce that as of the end of today, I am no longer a Facebook employee,” said Anderson on Twitter. “To be clear, this was in the works for a while. But after last week, I am happy to no longer support policies and values I vehemently disagree with.”

It seems that the virtual meeting with employees did not appease many of the staff, with one person asking on the call, “Why are the smartest people in the world focused on contorting and twisting our policies to avoid antagonizing Trump?” Others later said that they now believed it was futile to try to get Zuckerberg to change his mind.

On Monday, Vanita Gupta, Sherrilyn Ifill and Rashad Robinson, the heads of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and Color of Change, talked with Zuckerberg and Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg. After the call, the three agreed with the disgruntled employees, stating that they were “disappointed and stunned” with Zuckerberg’s decision.

“He did not demonstrate understanding of historic or modern-day voter suppression and he refuses to acknowledge how Facebook is facilitating Trump’s call for violence against protesters,” they said in a joint statement. “Mark is setting a very dangerous precedent for other voices who would say similar harmful things on Facebook.”

Photo: Alessio Jacona/Flickr