This archive report was first published on 14 June 2020.
June 14, 2020, marked a significant day for Facebook employee Brandon Dail, a user interface engineer based in Seattle, Washington. In a tweet on Friday, Dail announced that he had been let go by the company for calling out a colleague on Twitter.
According to Dail's LinkedIn profile, he had been with Facebook for more than two years. In a series of tweets, Dail explained that he had been part of a group of Facebook employees who had been publicly criticizing the company's handling of President Donald Trump's posts on the platform.
Specifically, Dail had asked a coworker, a front-end engineer who supervises Recoil, an open-source project by Facebook, to add a #BlackLivesMatter banner to the project's documentation. When the coworker responded privately rather than publicly, Dail called him out on Twitter, leading to his termination from Facebook.
"In the interest of transparency, I was let go for calling out an employee's inaction here on Twitter. I stand by what I said. They didn’t give me a chance to quit," Dail tweeted on Friday.
When asked for comment, Dail did not immediately respond. However, a Facebook spokesperson confirmed Dail's version of events, stating that he was fired for calling out a fellow employee in a tweet.
This incident follows a number of incidents in which employees at Facebook have publicly spoken out against CEO Mark Zuckerberg's inaction regarding controversial remarks posted by President Donald Trump.
