Facebook執行長馬克•扎克伯格（Mark Zuckerberg）拒絕對總統唐納德•特朗普（Donald Trump）的帖子採取行動，來自四面八方的壓力與日俱增。最新的一批人來自33名前員工，他們在公司早期就曾在公司工作過，其中包括一些幫助建立Facebook的人’他最初的社群指導方針。這封***最早由《****》發表；我們已將這封信全文轉載如下。

儘管這封信中的許多論據都是以前提過的，包括最近的《邊緣》雜誌，但今天發表的這封信卻對扎克伯格提出了一個非常明確和有力的論據’s位置。這群前僱員認為Facebook’奧巴馬對緩和特朗普的立場是不一致的，它有意識地讓公眾暴露於公司以前見過的危險之中，而且它**了一種重複的雙重標準，使得最有權勢的人的講話成為可能“不可侵犯。”

扎克伯格堅持認為，Facebook不應成為“真相的仲裁者”，並表示他在特朗普推特上的立場是基於研究和對話。雖然他對特朗普的種族主義語言表示厭惡，但他總結說，總統的“搶劫開始時，槍擊開始！波斯特“沒有被解讀為義務警員支持者自己伸張正義的警笛”的歷史。在包括週一的**在內的越來越多的內部異議之後，扎克伯格向員工承諾，公司將“重新審查有關各州威脅使用武力的政策”

作者寫道：“特朗普總統週五的帖子不僅威脅到國家對其公民的暴力，還向數百萬接受總統暗示的人發出了一個訊號。”。“在一個直播槍擊案的時代，Facebook應該比大多數人更清楚這一事件的危險性。特朗普的言辭浸透了美國種族主義的歷史，針對的是Facebook不允許向他重複他的話的人。”

以下是全文：

Facebook’s leadership must rec***ider their policies regarding political speech, beginning by fact-checking politicians and explicitly labeling harmful posts.

As early employees on teams across the company, we authored the original Community Standards, contributed code to products that gave voice to people and public figures, and helped to create a company culture around connection and freedom of expression.

We grew up at Facebook, but it is no longer ours.

The Facebook we joined designed products to empower people and policies to protect them. The goal was to allow as much expression as possible unless it would explicitly do harm. We disagreed often, but we all understood that keeping people safe was the right thing to do. Now, it seems, that commitment has changed.

We no longer work at Facebook, but we do not disclaim it. We also no longer recognize it. We remain proud of what we built, grateful for the opportunity, and hopeful for the positive force it can become. But none of that means we have to be quiet. In fact, we have a resp***ibility to speak up.

Today, Facebook’s leadership interprets freedom of expression to mean that they should do nothing — or very nearly nothing — to interfere in political discourse. They have decided that elected officials should be held to a lower standard than those they govern. One set of rules for you, and another for any politician, from your local mayor to the President of the United States. This exposes two fundamental problems:

First, Facebook’s behavior doesn’t match the stated goal of avoiding any political censorship. Facebook already is acting, as Mark Zuckerberg put it on Friday, as the “arbiter of truth.” It monitors speech all the time when it adds warnings to links, downranks content to reduce its spread, and fact checks political speech from non-politicians.

This is a betrayal of the ideals Facebook claims. The company we joined valued giving individuals a voice as loud as their government’s — protecting the powerless rather than the powerful.

Facebook now turns that goal on its head. It claims that providing warnings about a politician’s speech is inappropriate, but removing content from citizens is acceptable, even if both are saying the same thing. That is not a noble stand for freedom. It is incoherent, and worse, it is cowardly. Facebook should be holding politicians to a higher standard than their c***tituents.

Second, since Facebook’s inception, researchers have learned a lot more about group psychology and the dynamics of mass persuasion. Thanks to work done by the Dangerous Speech Project and many others, we understand the power words have to increase the likelihood of violence. We know the speech of the powerful matters most of all. It establishes norms, creates a permission structure, and implicitly authorizes violence, all of which is made worse by algorithmic amplification. Facebook’s leadership has spoken with these experts, with advocates, and with organizers, yet they still seem committed to granting the powerful free rein.

So what do we make of this? If all speech by politicians is newsworthy and all newsworthy speech is inviolable, then there is no line the most powerful people in the world cannot cross on the largest platform in the world — or at least none that the platform is willing to enforce.

President Trump’s post on Friday not only threatens violence by the state against its citizens, it also sends a signal to milli*** who take cues from the President. Facebook’s policy allows that post to stand alone. In an age of live-streamed shootings, Facebook should know the danger of this better than most. Trump’s rhetoric, steeped in the history of American raci**, targeted people whom Facebook would not allow to repeat his words back to him.

It is our shared heartbreak that motivates this letter. We are devastated to see something we built and something we believed would make the world a better place lose its way so profoundly. We understand it is hard to answer these questi*** at scale, but it was also hard to build the platform that created these problems. There is a resp***ibility to solve them, and solving hard problems is what Facebook is good at.

To current employees who are speaking up: we see you, we support you, and we want to help. We hope you will continue to ask yourselves the question that hangs on posters in each of Facebook’s offices: “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?”

To Mark: we know that you think deeply about these issues, but we also know that Facebook must work to regain the public’s trust. Facebook isn’t neutral, and it never has been. Making the world more open and connected, strengthening communities, giving everyone a voice — these are not neutral ideas. Fact-checking is not censorship. Labeling a call to violence is not authoritariani**. Please rec***ider your position.

Proceed and be bold.

Sincerely, some of your earliest employees:

Meredith Chin, Adam Conner, Natalie Ponte, Jon Warman, Dave Willner, on behalf of Ezra Callahan, Chris Putnam, Bob Trahan, Natalie Trahan, Ben Blumenrose, Jocelyn Blumenrose, Bobby Goodlatte, Simon Axten, Brandee Barker, Doug Fraser, Krista Kobeski, Warren Hanes, Caitlin O’Farrell Gallagher, Jake Brill, Carolyn Abram, Jamie Patterson, Abdus-Salam DeVaul, Scott Fortin, Bobby Kellogg, Tanja Balde, Alex Vichinsky, Matt Fernandez, Elizabeth Linder, Mike Ferrier, Jamie Patterson, Brian Sutorius, Amy Karasavas, Kathleen Estreich, Claudia Park