News Information and Media Site: Byers Market: Mark Zuckerberg faces staff as tensions mount

June 2, 2020

By DYLAN BYERS in Los Angeles &

AHIZA GARCÍA-HODGES in San Francisco

Good morning. 🔥 Protests raged across the country last night after President Donald Trump used the National Guard to forcibly clear peaceful protestors from the streets around the White House and threatened to send troops to states that failed to end demonstrations.

• What's next: For Trump, "there is no such thing as rock bottom," the veteran conservative columnist George Will warns. "So, assume that the worst is yet to come."

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Future of speech

Mark Zuckerberg faces staff as Facebook tensions mount

Moving the Market: Mark Zuckerberg will host his weekly Q&A session with Facebook staff today amid mounting criticism over his decision not to take any action on the incendiary posts in which Trump appeared to call for violence against protestors by writing, "when the looting starts, the shooting starts."

The latest: Hundreds of Facebook employees have now publicly protested Zuckerberg's' decision, with many participating in a "virtual walkout" on Monday by refusing to work or threatening to resign.

• Civil rights leaders also expressed frustration after a call with Zuckerberg and other top Facebook executives on Monday night, saying his explanations for the decision were "incomprehensible."

The big picture: Zuckerberg's staunch commitment to Facebook's free speech and political agnosticism is being tested by increasingly vocal critics who believe that issues like state violence and racial injustice are far more pressing than matters of speech.

What's next: The uphill battle for Zuckerberg in today's Q&A will be in convincing his critics that Trump's rhetoric qualifies as a warning of military action as opposed to an incitement to violence, and that the distinction is an important one for Facebook to uphold.

• Following Twitter's move to place warning labels on Trump's "looting/shooting" tweets, Zuckerberg will also have to explain why Facebook's policy only allows for keeping posts up or taking them down, but not applying similar warnings.

The big problem is that at the end of the day Zuckerberg will be mounting a philosophical/semantic argument on behalf of speech policy at a time when the nation is gripped by pressing questions about racism, police brutality and the limits of state power.

• Whether you sympathize with Zuckerberg's commitment to free speech or not, it's hard to see how it will come off as anything but discordant and out of touch with the times.

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Terms of engagement

Jack Dorsey vs. Trump, con't

Big in the Bay, big in the Beltway: We wrote yesterday that Jack Dorsey's decision to place a label on President Trump's tweets had thrust Twitter's philosopher-CEO into the very real and messy world of American politics in the Trump era.

• The latest: Republican FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr went on CNBC yesterday and accused Dorsey of "weaponizing" the company for "his own partisan political beliefs."

Bonus: Square, Dorsey's mobile payments company, tweeted last night that it stands with "our Black employees, our customers, and the Black community in demanding an end to systemic racism and police brutality."

• "Our company demands police policy reform now," Dorsey added from his personal account.

Market Links

• Barack Obama says he's still hopeful (Medium)

• Oren Frank pulls out of a Facebook deal (CNBC)

• Susan Wojcicki faces an advertising hurdle (WSJ)

• Jason Kilar brings Hulu to WarnerMedia (Deadline)

• Warren Schlichting is out at Sling TV (Variety)

Seth Herald/Getty

Line of fire

Police targeting journalists

Moving the media: Journalists continue to find themselves in the line of police fire as they try to cover protests and demonstrations in cities across the country, with several more reports of injuries sustained by members of the media on Monday.

• The big picture: "Many reporters, photographers and press advocates said the treatment of journalists... reflected an erosion of trust in the news media that has seeped into law enforcement under President Trump," NYT's Marc Tracy and Rachel Abrams report.

• The president "has deemed critical coverage of his administration 'fake news' and has frequently labeled some news organizations and journalists with variants of the phrase 'enemies of the people.'"

It has been especially hard for black journalists, per LAT's LZ Granderson: "The sleepless nights are a recurring theme among journalists of color who have made deaths of persons of color their unofficial beat," he writes.