LinkedIn CEO apologizes after several anonymous staffers share opinions echoing the skeptics of Black Lives Matter at an internal town hall on racial injustice
The highly professional social network's internal Wednesday town hall on racial injustice looked more like what you'd see in a Facebook comments section.
The Daily BeastMaxwell Tani
Context & Ripple Effects
LinkedIn's apology lands seven months after Facebook issued its own mea culpa over an anonymous Medium post alleging a culture of racism against black, Latinx, and Asian employees — the same playbook of anonymous employee testimony forcing a public executive response. The difference is venue: at LinkedIn the skepticism surfaced live, from staffers, at a town hall meant to address racial injustice.
CEO Ryan Roslansky (the executive on the hook) must now convert an apology into policy, with anonymous staffers having demonstrated that internal sentiment diverges from the company's stated position on Black Lives Matter.
Second-order effects
Black users weighing whether the 'professional' network is safe for racial-justice speech get a data point that shapes where they post — feeding directly into the later complaints about takedowns and visibility documented in the related coverage.
Third-order effects
Anonymous internal dissent is becoming a recurring mechanism for surfacing platform racism claims, pressuring social companies to treat workforce culture and content moderation as one governance problem rather than two.
The trend: Employee-driven racism controversies are pushing major platforms from reactive apologies toward published remediation plans, while their Black user communities organize publicly enough to hold them to it.
“I do not feel safe working at this company in a place where I was already uncomfortable with the treatment I've received on my OWN team since I started,” wrote one employee after seeing the cascade of racist comments. “This is so sad.” https://www.thedailybeast.com/ ...
“As a non-minority, all this talk makes me feel like I am supposed to feel guilty of my skin color. I feel like I should let someone less qualified fill my position. Is that ok?” (Microsoft LinkedIn staffers edition) https://www.thedailybeast.com/ ...
“but we won't lower the bar” to make diversity hires is a depressingly pervasive position in tech. Men who have said it (in)famously at FB, Twitter etc ironically don't see they themselves benefitted from a system built to favour them (and their fathers before & their fathers.. )…
One honest question I have about this story is — what do you do with regard to employees abroad? How much is it on them to understand the nuances of racial politics in a totally different country? (The US-based employee comments seem inexcusable though.) https://www.theverge.com/…
Did you know? The collective noun for a group of racist, entitled tech workers is ‘Damore’. 💡 Example sentence: “LinkedIn town hall on racial injustic derailed by a Damore of staffers” https://www.thedailybeast.com/ ...
“LinkedIn prides itself on being the highly professional, troll-free antithesis to all other social-media platforms.” First of all, LinkedIn is just Head Shot Facebook. https://www.thedailybeast.com/ ...
After I went for comment on this, LinkedIn's CEO sent an email to employees apologizing for the “small number of offensive comments” posted by some staff https://www.linkedin.com/...