Facebook Shut Down Anonymous Pro-Trump Employee Forum Over Harassment

An anonymous forum, which was used as a safe haven by supporters of President Donald Trump at Facebook during the 2016 presidential campaign, was shut down last year after things got ugly, according to Business Insider.

The forum was created in May 2015, and worked as an online discussion group in which employees could anonymously talk with eachother. Facebook Anon had hundreds of members and its content was often discussed by employees who were not in the group. The discussion spot gave employees the chance to talk about their complaints and concerns about the company’s policy and office culture, including light topics, like whether they should take home extra dinner from the cafeteria.

However, during the presidential election last year, the forum was increasingly used to talk about Trump and other candidates in the race. Members of the forum reportedly put up posters at Facebook’s campus before the election that read "Trump Supporters Welcome."

Facebook Anon became a hub for right-leaning employees during the months surrounding the presidential election.

“There was a feeling that everyone at the company was a Democrat or left-leaning,” a former employee told Business Insider.

Another worker said the management didn’t envision “the wildfire around the election.”

"I don’t think they really thought there would be too many people on the Trump side," said the former employee.

Facebook shut down the group shortly after the election in December 2016. Three months after the company pulled the plug, CEO Mark Zuckerberg was asked by an employee during an all-hands meeting why Facebook Anon was shut down. He said the forum had been used to harass people, adding that the behavior wouldn't be tolerated.

After Zuckerberg’s answer, a poster was put up in Facebook’s campus that said: "Silenced, but not silent."

In a statement to International Business Times, Lori Goler, Head of People at Facebook, said:

“Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together, and a cornerstone of our culture is being open. The FB Anon internal Facebook group violated our Terms of Service, which require people who use Facebook (including our employees) to use an authentic identity on our platform. Last year we disabled any anonymous internal groups or pages within Facebook, and reminded our people of the places at our company where they can have discussions about issues that matter to them, openly or confidentially as appropriate.”

Facebook had previously run into problems with the anonymous group during the Black Lives Matter movement last year, around the time Zuckerberg spoke out against workers who crossed out "Black Lives Matter" and wrote "All Lives Matter" on the walls of the company’s California headquarters.

"We've never had rules around what people can write on our walls — we expect everybody to treat each other with respect. Regardless of the content or location, crossing out something means silencing speech, or that one person's speech is more important than another's," Zuckerberg said at the time according to an internal memo obtained by Gizmodo.

The revelation about Facebook Anon’s shutdown comes as U.S. tech companies struggle with protecting workers’ free speech rights and at the same time try to fight against hate speech, like Google’s recent case. Google fired engineer James Damore over a 10-page internal diversity memo earlier this month. In the memo, which was released by Motherboard, Damore said women are not represented at higher levels in tech companies compared to men because of automatic biological differences. He added that women employees tend to be more neurotic and move into less detail-focused fields of work depending on how they prefer "people rather than things.”

“Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don't have 50 percent representation of women in tech and leadership,” Damore said in the memo. “Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business.”

After Damore was fired, he was hailed as a hero by member of the alt-right, however he said he doesn’t support them.