
Why Did Facebook Fire a Top Executive? Hint: It Had Something to Do with Trump - grej
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/why-did-facebook-fire-a-top-executive-hint-it-had-something-to-do-with-trump/ar-BBPAcC5
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dreta
Nice to have this on paper, but I'm fairly sure everybody knew this already.

It's scary that people like Luckey or Thiel aren't immune to political
persecution in Silicon Valley. Can't imagine how oppressive the environment
has to be for the regular folk.

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wilde
Executives don’t have private lives. They are corporate avatars, and their
actions are inevitably cast back on the organization. Zuckerberg built a
business on encouraging people to move private conversations into the public
sphere, so he’s likely keenly aware of this. Associating the Oculus brand with
r/The_Donald was probably not one of the PR goals for that quarter so it makes
sense that this was a business problem that is relevant professionally.

What surprised me more in this piece was that he supposedly forced Luckey to
sign a statement that was clearly factually wrong? That just seems like a way
to extend the PR cycle. I suspect Luckey tried to have it both ways and got
caught but I guess the court case will figure it out.

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rurban
Comparable to Renaissance firing Bob Mercer. Looks ugly, but it probably cost
them business they feared to loose.

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np_tedious
Can't stand Trump, but this is not ok

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mcv
I agree. I wouldn't put him in charge of a project that's trying to fight fake
news being spread on Facebook, but other than that, a person's political
belief should be able to remain a private matter. As long as it doesn't affect
his role in the company, I suppose.

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dreta
In a clearly biased environment like Facebook everything is "Fake News".

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BenMorganIO
I know some comments are saying that political views should not get in the way
of one's role at a company, but it looks like a lot of people at Facebook, the
smaller people, were pressuring the executives to let Luckey go.

> Mr. Luckey’s donation and the perception that he might be associated with a
> group that at times traded in misogynistic and white-supremacist messages,
> as some news stories reported, ignited a firestorm. Facebook employees
> expressed anger about Mr. Luckey on internal message boards and at a weekly
> town hall meeting in late September 2016, questioning why he was still
> employed, according to people familiar with the complaints.

> “Multiple women have literally teared up in front of me in the last few
> days,” an engineering director, Srinivas Narayanan, wrote in one internal
> post following the meeting. Mr. Narayanan didn’t respond to requests for
> comment.

> Some virtual-reality-game developers said they wouldn’t work with Oculus in
> the future.

If I were an executive, I would have let him go. An executive cannot let
female employees feel unsafe and cannot have employees asking "Why is this
person still here?" A single person cannot make other developers avoid
projects no matter who they are.

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malvosenior
If I were an executive and an employee came to me literally crying because one
of their coworkers had a political opinion they didn't like, I would tell that
person that it was none of their business and that they were acting
inappropriately by injecting their politics into their work. If they continued
to make problems, I'd let them go.

I wouldn't allow my company to become a political battleground and ethically I
would feel it was the right thing to do (even if more people were upset).

