A week ago, famed venture capitalist and Facebook investor Peter Thiel said he would donate $1.25 million to Donald Trump's presidential campaign. The news prompted wide condemnation of Thiel’s clear support of a candidate who was then being publicly accused of sexually assaulting women (and who was denying the accusations in the vilest of ways). The timing of Thiel’s donation seemed to indicate that not only was Thiel still willing to back Trump, he strongly endorsed Trump's actions. As a result of his tone-deaf pledge, many in the tech world called for his removal from company boards and other high-level positions.
But instead of heeding the calls, the many pals of the billionaire investor made the institutional choice to stick by him as he sticks by Trump, even as these same pals outspokenly object to Trump himself. “We are not going to fire someone over his or her support of a political candidate,” said Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator, where Thiel is a part-time partner. “That would be… a dangerous path to start down.” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg also responded to the calls, albeit in an internal memo dug up by the press. His reasoning for keeping Trump on Facebook's board, a reasoning echoed by other Valley VIPs? Diversity.
That’s right: taking the point of view of a white male billionaire, whose actions show he is concerned with lots of other things---floating libertarian city-states and living forever among them, but no, not diversity---now counts as embracing this same concept in Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley, the 50 square miles of land in the US that has created more wealth than any other place in human history but has still achieved very little in becoming a more inclusive, truly diverse place. Once and for all, any company defending their connection to Peter Thiel as he vocally and vigorously supports Trump is not embracing diversity. It’s making hollow excuses that show it doesn't get the idea at all.
To be clear, Thiel stands apart from the vast majority of Silicon Valley in his support of Trump. The tech industry as a whole has donated around $8 million to the Clinton campaign, compared to $300,000 to Trump, according to the crowdfunding platform Crowdpac, which tracks political donations. Even as Altman and Zuckerberg stand by Thiel, they disavow Trump himself in the harshest terms. But it's specifically because of this meager support that they argue Thiel shouldn't face any concrete consequences. Letting Thiel be heard, they say, allows for much more political diversity.
“We can't create a culture that says it cares about diversity and then excludes almost half the country because they back a political candidate,” Zuckerberg wrote in his memo. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal also reported that Zuckerberg himself stepped in when some Facebook employees wanted to remove Trump posts supporting the banning of Muslims from the US because they constituted hate speech, a violation of Facebook's community standards.
The problem is that Zuckerberg can't simply take the word "diversity" and try to make it mean something it doesn't. “Diversity” has become a loaded term in Silicon Valley, where the tech industry is overwhelmingly white and male, especially at the top. Thiel represents the status quo and Trump something even worse: an active effort to undermine and roll back the progress made by women and people of color in the US. For an industry that pays lip service to promoting diversity, Thiel and Trump stand for the opposite.
Even worse than dissembling on the issue of diversity, co-opting the concept as cover for Thiel's support of Trump normalizes the GOP candidate's unprecedented attitudes and actions. Thiel didn't just donate more than one million dollars to Trump's presidential campaign; he did so after a number of women accused Trump of sexual assault. This from a guy who in the 1990s co-authored a book called the The Diversity Myth that claims rape culture is "mythical." Thiel isn't just an everyday citizen putting a little money behind a candidate he supports. He is one of the Trump campaign's biggest donors who spoke on prime time television at the Republican National Convention to promote the candidate. Thiel's money and visibility give Trump cover.
Yes, plenty of people on Facebook and in the real world might support Trump for reasons that, in Zuckerberg's words, "do not involve racism, sexism, xenophobia or accepting sexual assault." And polling shows many of those supporters do not come from the country's privileged classes. As Altman argues, having an institutional policy to fire them from their jobs would be a "dangerous path" to follow. But Thiel is a member of the Silicon Valley elite, a billionaire uses his fortune to ensure his views are heard and promoted. He is the opposite of marginalized, and arguing that kicking him off Facebook's board is the same thing as firing any given person for their political views is a false equivalence. Zuckerberg's real struggle is trying to stay neutral when a neutral position doesn't exist.
This is not Facebook’s first time wrestling awkwardly with partisan politics. The most high-profile incident was the Trending Topics mess from May, when Facebook fended off accusations that biased human curators were suppressing conservative news. Facebook fired its human news team and promised that algorithms would play the central role in choosing stories for its Trending sidebar. Computers, supposedly, could be more neutral. Almost immediately, however, fake news stories started trending. Then Facebook apparently banned an iconic photo taken by a Pulitzer-winning Associated Press photographer during the Vietnam War that contained nudity. The company backpedaled after a public outcry.
Both incidents illustrate the unavoidable fact that Facebook picks and chooses what appears on its site based on a set of standards. Zuckerberg may want to portray Facebook as a neutral platform that welcomes the views and opinions of everyone on the service. But every day Facebook, its employees, and its algorithms are applying value judgements about what gets seen and what doesn't.
The same holds true for Facebook's board, as it does for Thiel's gig at Y Combinator and elsewhere. In keeping Thiel around, these companies have chosen to condone what Trump and Thiel, in his backing of Trump, have decided to publicly stand for. Thiel isn't just another Facebook user; he's a man in a unique position of power who has decided to use that power to suppress diversity and work against the very goals Zuckerberg claims to support. Zuckerberg may fear that in removing Thiel, Facebook opens itself up to charges of bias. But it's too late: not removing him is biased against everyone who Trump has demeaned. Zuckerberg may want a middle to straddle, but it doesn't exist. "Diversity" certainly isn't it.
