Former Facebook employee releases internal memo accusing the company of failing its black users and employees

A former Facebook employee is going public with his claims that the company is failing its black employees as well as its black users.

“Facebook has a black people problem,” begins Mark S. Luckie’s internal memo shared publicly for the first time on Tuesday. Luckie says he circulated his memo to all of Facebook’s global employees on November 8, not long before his last day working at the company. Luckie worked at the company for a little over one year as a Strategic Partner Manager for Influencers.

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In the memo, Luckie shared his experiences as one of the few black employees working at Facebook. The former Facebook staffer reflects on moments of prejudice and racism he experience in his time with the company.

“Facebook’s disenfranchisement of black people on the platform mirrors the marginalization of its black employees. In my time at the company, I’ve heard far too many stories from black employees of a colleague or manager calling them "hostile" or "aggressive" for simply sharing their thoughts in a manner not dissimilar from their non-Black team members. A few black employees have reported being specifically dissuaded by their managers from becoming active in the [internal] Black@ group or doing “Black stuff,” even if it happens outside of work hours. Too many black employees can recount stories of being aggressively accosted by campus security beyond what was necessary.

On a personal note, at least two or three times a day, every day, a colleague at MPK [Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park] will look directly at me and tap or hold their wallet or shove their hands down their pocket to clutch it tightly until I pass. The frequency is even higher when walking through Classic campus or Building 20. To feel like an oddity at your own place of employment because of the color of your skin while passing posters reminding you to be your authentic self feels in itself inauthentic.”

Luckie also criticized how Facebook HR handles the concerns of its black employees, often brushing the issue off.

The now ex-Facebook employee did give the company’s Diversity team major credit for their work increasing the number of black employees at Facebook. Facebook’s annual diversity report showed that the organization increased the number of black employees from 2 percent to 4 percent of the workforce between 2016 and 2018.

However, Luckie makes it clear that Facebook still has much more work to do.

“Although incremental changes are being made, the fact remains that the population of Facebook employees doesn’t reflect its most engaged user base. There is often more diversity in Keynote presentations than the teams who present them. In some buildings, there are more “Black Lives Matter” posters than there are actual black people. Facebook can’t claim that it is connecting communities if those communities aren’t represented proportionately in its staffing.”

He goes on to say that oftentimes Facebook teams without a black person on staff would ask a black employee of another team to volunteer their help on projects where they needed input on race.

Luckie points out that the issues regarding diversity in the Facebook workforce trickle down and affect the platform’s black user base.

“Black people are far outpacing other groups on the platform in a slew of engagement metrics. African Americans are more likely to use Facebook to communicate with family and friends daily, according to research commissioned by Facebook,” writes Luckie. “But their experiences are sometimes far from positive. Black people are finding that their attempts to create ‘safe spaces’ on Facebook for conversation among themselves are being derailed by the platform itself.”

Luckie claims that content posted by black Facebook users on topics such as race, for example, are reported by non-black people and the platform often times removes the content. He also raises the problem with Facebook building everything based on its data, which often disadvantages minority groups on the platform.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg previously had an internal memo of his own leak that referenced the diversity issues within Facebook. In a private memo posted on an employee-only announcement page in 2016, Zuckerberg requested that staff stop crossing out ‘Black Lives Matter’ and writing ‘All Lives Matter’ the on the company’s famous signature walls.