Racist employees at Facebook are defacing the notorious signature wall at the company’s Menlo Park headquarters.
Multiple instances of people scratching out “Black Lives Matter,” and replacing it with “All Lives Matter,” have been noticed at the company’s headquarters, prompting CEO Mark Zuckerberg to post a notice on a company-only private chat room reminding employees not to be racist and offensive jerks at work, Gizmodo reports.
Black Lives Matter is a movement that highlights police brutality, inequality, and injustices faced within African-American communities in the U.S. The movement began in 2012 following the death of teenager Trayvon Martin and has since become a powerful narrative in discussions about race in America.
Facebook, with a workforce that is only two percent Black, has faced criticism in the past for its lack of diversity and stereotypical brogrammer culture, and while the company is making its diversity and inclusion efforts public, it’s struggling to live up to its promises.
An EEO filing released in June shows Facebook only hired seven Black people out of 1,231 new hires in 2013, and its most recent diversity data shows other minorities are underrepresented as well, with a workforce of four percent Hispanic and three percent two or more races.
Zuckerberg apparently had to tell the staff multiple times to stop scribbling out the message, one that Twitter famously displayed in huge font in its lunchroom at its San Francisco headquarters. Since his first message apparently did not get across, he posted another one in an internal employee chatroom, which Gizmodo got its hands on.
Gizmodo
Facebook is launching an investigation to find the person or people responsible, Zuckerberg notes. We’ve reached out to Facebook for comment and will update if we hear back.
H/T Gizmodo | Illustration via Max Fleishman