The hypocrisy of Facebook's silence on Peter Thiel's support for Donald Trump

It’s not often that Mark Zuckerberg invokes the values of Facebook to rebuke the people he works with, but this year, he reached a tipping point with the “deeply upsetting” views of one of the members of his board of directors, which he disavowed as “not represent[ing] the way Facebook or I think at all”.

“Facebook stands for helping to connect people and giving them voice to shape their own future,” he wrote. “But to shape the future we need to understand the past.”

One might expect that those words were aimed at Peter Thiel, the Facebook board member who has bucked Silicon Valley political orthodoxy by backing Donald Trump’s xenophobic, Islamophobic, sexist, anti-science, and increasingly dictatorial campaign for president. After all, Trump’s ideology represents a direct threat to Facebook’s stated mission to “make the world more open and connected”.

But in fact, Zuckerberg’s reproof was directed at another board member, Marc Andreessen, for an ill-advised series of tweets that appeared to express nostalgia for colonial rule of India. Amid Trump’s ongoing campaign to undermine his supporters’ faith in the country’s democratic processes, Andreessen’s transgression seems almost quaint.

And yet, Zuckerberg and Facebook remain silent on Thiel, who has not only served as a delegate and convention speaker for Trump, but this week donated $1.25m to support Trump’s campaign, even as a flood of allegations of sexual misconduct scared off major donors and leaders of the Republican party.

Zuckerberg’s curious double standard with Thiel was echoed by Sam Altman, president of the influential startup incubator Y Combinator.

Over the weekend, Altman came under pressure to sever ties with Thiel, who serves as a “part-time partner” of Y Combinator. Altman has spoken out forcefully against Trump, whom he recently compared to Hitler in a blogpost. But he wrote Monday that he would not “start purging people for supporting the wrong political candidate”.

Altman’s support for Thiel does have its limits, however. “Of course, if Peter said some of the things Trump says himself, he would no longer be part of Y Combinator,” he wrote.

What those “things” might be is an open question, but it’s not hard to imagine that if Thiel angered the entire nation of India or repeated his 2009 views on the tragic consequences of women’s suffrage, Altman – and Zuckerberg – might find themselves compelled to pacify the public.

Money talks, and in Silicon Valley, it seems, money can say whatever it wants as long as one’s public statements (be they convention speeches or Washington Post op-eds) obfuscate the bigotry that lies beneath.

It is perhaps notable that the public support of one tech industry mogul for the Republican party nominee has produced such controversy. After all, no one blinks when a billionaire banker or industrialist is revealed to donate to conservatives.

“Do we think doctors are evil because Ben Carson is supporting Trump? Are you evil because there are journalists like Sean Hannity? When did we start analyzing entire industries and professions?” asked Anshu Sharma, a venture capitalist with Storm Ventures.

It’s a fair point, but one that is undermined by the industry’s own PR, which constantly insists that tech companies are about more than just making money, but about changing the world (for the better). Couple that with the tech community’s high opinion of its own intelligence, and it’s not surprising that people hold it to a higher moral standard than they do Wall Street.

It’s a kind of tech exceptionalism that Sharma embodied when he added, “40% of America supports Trump ... And of the top 100 billionaires, one is supporting Trump. Isn’t that a good proof that we are 40 times better at judging than the rest of the nation.”

It’s not only observers and critics of the industry who are raising concerns about Thiel, but committed members of the community, from diversity in tech advocates to venture capitalist Chris Sacca.

“It’s not that the tech industry is morally cleaner. It’s that it has such universal power over its users that it’s kind of important that we not allow that power to fall into the hands of monsters,” said Maciej Ceglowski, a developer and the owner of Pinboard, a social bookmarking site.

“Secondly, this is my industry, and I’m sickened to see it stand silently by and in tacit support of this,” he added.

Ceglowski was one of the sharpest critics of Y Combinators’s support of Trump, tweeting through his company’s handle.

He called Facebook’s continuing support of Thiel “disgraceful” but said he was targeting Y Combinator because he had little faith that Facebook would respond at all.

Facebook did not respond to a request for comment on Thiel.

The lesson Ceglowski said we can glean from tech’s response to Peter Thiel is the perfect public relations strategy for an industry that proclaims “Black Lives Matter” while overwhelmingly failing to diversify its own staffs.

“Hate speech is fine as long as you find a proxy to do it,” he said.