Silicon Valley is often praised for its enlightened workplaces, with tech companies offering amenities such as yoga classes, free organic food, and nap pods. But Facebook employees evidently believe these corporate perks extend to the coddling of their personal political views. At least that’s one explanation for their overreaction to news that Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s vice president of global public policy, showed up to support his friend Brett Kavanaugh during the latter’s confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court. Kaplan was in Washington, D.C., in a private capacity, not as a representative of Facebook, and is a longtime friend of Kavanaugh (they were in each other’s weddings). But as the recent hearings have shown us, the personal is now permanently political, even (and especially) for old friends.
Facebook employees were so incensed that Kaplan had attended the hearings that they flooded internal company message boards to complain. The tone grew so irate that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg himself attempted to reassure everyone by reminding them that Kaplan was not acting in an official capacity. This only exacerbated things. As the New York Times reported, one Facebook employee sensed a conspiracy: “[Kaplan’s] seat choice was intentional, knowing full well that journalists would identify every public figure appearing behind Kavanaugh. He knew that this would cause outrage internally, but he knew that he couldn’t get fired for it. This was a protest against our culture, and a slap in the face to his fellow employees.”
The Guardian’s “Week in Patriarchy” newsletter (yes, that’s a thing) agreed, channeling Facebook employee anger and warning Kaplan: “You might think twice about publicly flaunting your support. You might think about what sort of message that would send to your colleagues and employees—not to mention the 2 billion people who use your social network.”
But Facebook employees, like most other Silicon Valley denizens, don’t even slightly mind sending messages when the cause or candidate is liberal. No Google employees threatened a walkout when chairman Eric Schmidt advised Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign; no one batted an eye at Facebook when COO and board member Sheryl Sandberg openly endorsed Clinton. “Tonight, I am hopeful thinking about what it means for my children to watch Hillary Clinton accept the Democratic nomination for president of the United States and for me to [be] able to tell them #ImWithHer,” Sandberg posted on Facebook at the time.
Facebook employees should not have been surprised to learn Kaplan has conservative friends. When the company hired him in 2011, he was known to be a conservative who previously worked for President George W. Bush. Indeed, Kaplan’s presence is likely important to Facebook’s executives in their effort to signal ideological diversity at a time when the company faces criticism from politicians on both sides of the aisle as well as from conservatives who believe the platform is ideologically biased against them.
Kaplan’s private decision to support his friend upset his fellow employees not because he’d violated company policy (Kaplan had used a personal day for the trip and had broken no rules). It upset them because Kaplan is conservative. A cynic might wonder if one of the reasons Facebook just experienced the most serious privacy breach in its history is in part because its employees are too busy venting their liberal spleens on internal message boards to mind the store.
And Zuckerberg’s reassurances about Kaplan failed to achieve the desired effect. A few employees even accused Zuckerberg of tacitly endorsing sexual assault and causing them “stress and trauma,” according to the New York Times. Several female employees said they “would not feel comfortable working in the Washington office under Mr. Kaplan.”
One of the few grownups in the room at Facebook, executive Andrew Bosworth, also faced a backlash after making a reasonable argument to employees: “If you need to change teams, companies or careers to make sure your day-to-day life matches your passions, we will be sad to see you go, but we will understand,” Mr. Bosworth wrote, according to the Times. “We will support you with any path you choose. But it is your responsibility to choose a path, not that of the company you work for.” Facebook employees were furious, and he had to apologize. “I spoke at a time when I should be listening and that was a big mistake.”
Eventually Kaplan had to offer a mea culpa for his “mistake” as well, appearing alongside Zuckerberg and Sandberg at what Axios described as an “intense” town hall meeting that was livestreamed to all of Facebook’s employees. Kaplan reiterated that he was at Kavanaugh’s hearings in a personal capacity, which didn’t prevent Zuckerberg and Sandberg from declaring it a “lapse in judgment” for him to have done so. Kaplan later posted an internal message to employees that said, in part, “I believe in standing by your friends, especially when times are tough for them,” according to the Times.
If you’re only comfortable working with people who agree with you politically, there are plenty of jobs that offer that opportunity—in politics, activism, and the nonprofit world, to name just a few. But if you work for a global corporate behemoth like Facebook, you’re likely to encounter people who don’t share your views, something plenty of people think is a benefit of a diverse workplace. Tolerance shouldn’t end where political differences begin.
But as the Kaplan episode at Facebook revealed, there’s a broader problem at work here: the insinuation of politics into every aspect of people’s lives, something the progressive left has encouraged in recent years. Don’t vote your conscience on your own time; make everything a cause, including the private activities of your coworkers. Don’t protest elected officials by peaceful means or at the ballot box by democratic ones—run them out of restaurants and corner them in elevators and post their home addresses online to encourage round-the-clock harassment. And by all means call out your colleagues for their private beliefs and their private behavior. At Facebook at least, friends don’t let friends be conservative.