*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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