Was This Top Executive-Entrepreneur Fired by Facebook for Supporting President Trump?

Calvin Freiburger : Nov 14, 2018
LifeSiteNews.com

"There are a lot more people who know if they talk about these things, it could cause problems for them," [Palmer Luckey] said, adding that conservatives privately admit to not donating to their candidates because "I care more about the thing that I'm working on than that whole politics game."

[LifeSiteNews.com] Tech entrepreneur Palmer Luckey's departure from Facebook has been a source of speculation since early 2017, and now a new report seemingly backs suspicions that he was ousted for dissenting from the company's left-wing political culture. (Photo: Palmer Luckey/Wikimedia Commons/via LifeSiteNews)

The 26-year-old Luckey is the designer of the Oculus Rift virtual-reality gaming headset and one of Forbes' richest U.S. entrepreneurs below age 40. He has credited President Donald Trump's book, The Art of the Deal, as an early career inspiration, and wrote to him in 2011 to urge him to run for president. After the election, Luckey donated $100,000 to Trump's inaugural committee.

In September 2016, it was reported that Luckey financially supported Nimble America, a group that took credit for various content critical of failed 2016 Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton. Luckey responded at the time with a Facebook statement apologizing for the impact his actions had on his colleagues and claiming he was voting for Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson instead of Clinton or Trump.

He left Facebook the following March. The social media giant denied his politics had anything to do with his departure, with founder Mark Zuckerberg claiming as much when testifying before Congress, but the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reports it has uncovered emails and spoken with insiders indicating the opposite.

"Internal Facebook emails suggest the matter was discussed at the highest levels of the company," WSJ's Keach Hagey reports. "In the fall of 2016, as unhappiness over the donation simmered, Facebook executives including Mr. Zuckerberg pressured Mr. Luckey to publicly voice support for libertarian candidate Gary Johnson."

The extent of Luckey's involvement with Nimble America, as well as pro-Trump and anti-Hillary, Reddit posts attributed to him, were reportedly a source of recurring anger among Facebook employees, from internal message boards to at least one weekly town hall meeting.

"Multiple women have literally teared up in front of me in the last few days" over Luckey's continued presence at the company, engineering director Srinivas Narayanan claimed after the meeting.

In fact, Facebook executives not only pressured Luckey to write the apology post but dictated his contents, according to WSJ's sources. "I need to tell you that Mark [Zuckerberg] himself drafted this and details are critical," Facebook Deputy General Counsel Paul Grewal told a lawyer for Luckey in an email with an early draft of the statement, which "went through many drafts"... Subscribe for free to Breaking Christian News here

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