Facebook engineer Ashok Chandwaney quits, saying, “Facebook is on the wrong path.”
Facebook software engineer Ashok Chandwaney has watched with growing unease as the platform has become a haven for hate. On Tuesday morning, it came time to take a stand.
“I’m quitting because I can no longer stomach contributing to an organization profiting off hate in the US and globally,” Chandwaney wrote in a letter posted on Facebook’s internal employee network shortly after 8 a.m. Pacific time. The nearly 1,300-word document was detailed, bristling with links to bolster its claims, and scathing in its conclusions.
The letter, which Chandwaney elaborated on during an interview with The Washington Post, also cited Facebook’s refusal to remove a post by President Trump in May saying “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” and dismissed the company’s response to civil rights issues as mere public relations maneuvers. Chandwaney was hoping Facebook would take all of the recommendations from its civil rights audit in July, which concluded that the company’s policy actions “were a tremendous setback,” and said that it would be more responsive to the demands of the advertising boycott organized under the hashtag #StopHateForProfit.
Original interview published in The Washington Post by By Craig Timberg and Elizabeth Dwoskin
for Ashok Chandwaney’s letter