*By Alex Heath*
Facebook has failed to properly address its “black people problem,” a former employee told Cheddar Wednesday.
Earlier this month, former partnerships manager Mark Luckie sent a searing memo criticizing the company’s lack of racial diversity to Facebook employees shortly before he left his post.
He recently published the memo, which quickly went viral.
While most Silicon Valley tech companies don't feature a diverse workforce, Luckie said Facebook, given its scale and massive user base, has a greater responsibility.
“You’re talking about a company that affects 2.5 billion people directly who engage with its products,” he said. “And Facebook touts itself as a place that is engaged with diversity and really thinking about these issues.”
Facebook’s workforce is only 4 percent black, despite the company’s commissioned research showing that African Americans are more likely to use its platform to communicate with people in the U.S.
Just one day after Luckie published his memo, Facebook announced that it was donating $1 million to CodePath.org, an organization that offers computer classes to minorities. In response to Luckie’s memo, a Facebook spokesperson told Cheddar that, “We are going to keep doing all we can to be a truly inclusive company.”
Employee morale is at an all-time low at Facebook, according to The Wall Street Journal. And externally, CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg are under intense public scrutiny over the company’s many privacy and misinformation scandals.
“I think it’s important going forward that the company think of the worst possible uses of its platform and not just the best case scenarios, because when you do that you’re able to avoid some of the issues that Facebook has gone through up to this point,” Luckie said.
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From the end of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association to the beginning of a new zombie apocalypse, here's what's going on in entertainment.
One person was killed and multiple people were sent to local hospitals after a boat capsized Monday during a tour of an underground cavern system built to carry water from the Erie Canal beneath the western New York city of Lockport, officials said.
There was plenty of uncertainty in the run-up to this year’s Tony Awards, which at one point seemed unlikely to happen at all because of the ongoing Hollywood writer’s strike.
Classical music concerts have been popular since the age of Beethoven, Bach, and Mozart, but you've probably never thought about attending one in a cemetery. Our own Chloe Aiello spoke with Andrew Ousley, founder of Death of Classical, to learn more about a concert series held in the catacombs of the Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.
You may not know her name, but you've probably seen her face. Madhulika Sharma has graced Vogue India and ELLE Magazine and modeled for popular brands such as Reformation and Skims. Cheddar's own Hena Doba spoke with Sharma to discuss her globe-spanning modeling career, her education in fashion history, and working alongside Kim Kardashian.
The intimate, funny-sad musical “Kimberly Akimbo” nudged aside more splashier rivals on Sunday to win the best new musical crown at the Tony Awards on a night when Broadway flexed its muscle in the face of Hollywood writers’ strike and fully embraced trans-rights with history-making winners.
The ChatGPT chatbot, personified by different avatars on a huge screen above the altar, led the more than 300 people through 40 minutes of prayer, music, sermons and blessings.
New York's Assembly and Senate passed a bill to create a commission that would consider reparations for slavery.
New Orleans' Big Freedia, who many heard on Beyonce's new hit "Break My Soul," talks about upcoming business ventures and music projects, including a new show called Big Freedia Means Business on Fuse TV.
