‘Profiting Off Hate’: Facebook Engineer Quits Saying Company Is ‘On The Wrong Side of History’

Outraged at the company’s policies, Ashok Chandwaney, a software engineer at Facebook publicly resigned from the social media company on Tuesday, reported The Washington Post. In a scathing letter, Ashok accused Facebook of ‘profiting off hate’ and criticised it for ‘choosing to be on the wrong side of history’. Also Read – After WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger Limits Forwarding Messages to People or Group

Chandwaney, who identifies as a non-gender binary and prefers pronouns such as they or them wrote in the 1300-word resignation letter that they “can no longer stomach contributing to an organization that is profiting off hate in the US and globally.”

Chandwaney further alleged that the social media giant has not taken enough measures to curb the rise on the platform of racism, disinformation and incitements to violence.

Every day ‘the looting starts, the shooting starts’ stays up is a day that we choose to minimize regulatory risk at the expense of the safety of Black, Indigenous, and people of colour,” Chandwaney wrote, referencing the inflammatory language that Trump used in that post.

“Often, I hear people explain how hard it is to do things like remove hate content, stop hate organising, or etc. To me being bold means seeing something that’s hard to do but, knowing it’s the right thing to do, rolling up my sleeves, and diving in,” Chandwaney alleged.

The letter also mentions Facebook’s ‘Focus on Impact’, wherein they cited specific incidents of Facebook’s failures and mishaps, such as the company obstructing an investigation into the genocide in Myanmar and failing to remove an event encouraging people to shoot and kill protesters in Kenosha.

“We invest billions of dollars each year to keep our community safe and are in deep partnership with outside experts to review and update our policies,” Bourgeois said in a statement to Washington Post.