Mark S. Luckie is a former employee at Facebook who stirred up the Internet recently, revealing that the social media company is discriminatory in its practices. Before leaving the company, Luckie stated that despite black people being more active on the social media website as per the company’s own engagement metrics, Facebook has ignored the interests of the community.
A number of black users have had their posts removed and, in some cases, their accounts suspended with no means of recovery. Whenever a black user requests help on the platform, help is seldom offered unless it gets major traction in the press. Needless to say, for a website to be successful it needs to include all communities and cater to their needs. The company has made incremental changes to improve the situation, but this has led to nothing impactful.
Luckie revealed that several co-employees were subjected to discrimination for simply expressing their ideas and were called out as aggressive. Campus security checks against black employees were heavily accosted compared to non-black members of the company.
Facebook had responded to the memo released by Luckie stating “The growth in representation of people from more diverse groups, working in many different functions across the company, is a key driver of our ability to succeed. We want to fully support all employees when there are issues reported and when there may be micro-behaviors that add up. We are going to keep doing all we can to be a truly inclusive company.”
The HR department of the company was also accused of being too defensive about the management and the company’s status quo. Whenever black members raised issues they face at the workplace; they were actively dismissed in Luckie’s time at the company. Other black employees who read the memo confirmed what the ex-employee had to say about the company. It remains to be seen how Facebook handles the situation and addresses issues of the black community.
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