Sign the open letter to Facebook:
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To Mr. Zuckerberg, Ms. Sandberg, and Facebook company management:
We are health care providers, hospital personnel, food service workers, other essential workers, and their friends writing to implore you to implement measures that will restrict the use of your platform to spread and encourage protests against life-saving shelter-in-place orders. We ask that you ban all Facebook event pages that call for protesting shelter-in-place.
As workers in the frontlines of COVID-19, we are disturbed by Facebook's complicity in these protests and their role in re-opening states well before shelter-in-place measures have achieved their intended purpose to contain the spread of the virus. Until you regulate protests specifically intended to re-open states too early, Facebook is actively endangering nationwide public health and safety, in the midst of a fatal yet avoidable shortage of hospital beds, testing kits, and personal protective equipment.
Facebook's inaction contributes to this pandemic's disproportionate impact on women, which Ms. Sandberg herself acknowledges in a plea for action she penned to governments and organizations. Facebook company's refusal to ban forums that encourage flouting stay-at-home measures actively endangers the lives of women who make up 77% of health care workers, 78% of social workers, and more than two-thirds of grocery store and fast-food employees, all of whom have little choice but to risk exposing themselves to the coronavirus to try to keep the rest of the public safe and cared for while this pandemic lasts.1 Facebook's refusal to take action makes it complicit in the outsized impact of COVID-19 on people of color and low-income communities, who are being infected at much higher rates.2
We are equally demanding that Facebook refrain from banning or censoring communities and content that do not pose harm to public health and safety during this pandemic, as it has done with users from the trans community or with content from advocates. Facebook's own policy restricts content for "violence," "harassment," and "false news," each of which describes these protests that actively endanger the public.
Over 1 million people in the United States have contracted COVID-19. The death toll in the U.S. as of this writing has reached above 70,000. More than 9,000 of our fellow health workers have been infected. We implore Facebook executives to act immediately to protect frontline, essential workers and the larger public and ban the use of your platform to promote protests that endanger public health and disregard stay-at-home measures.
Signed,
Essential workers, our loved ones & community members
1 How Millions of Women Became the Most Essential Workers in America, New York Times, April 18, 2020
2 Coronavirus: Why some racial groups are more vulnerable, BBC, April 20, 2020