Dear Mark Zuckerberg And Leadership, This Letter Is A Follow-up To The Letter That Was Circulated Internally

Meta employees publish an open letter to management (see below) to show how meta has promoted the genocide. This is how the suppression happens

🧵

— Paul Biggar 🇵🇸🇮🇪 (@paulbiggar) May 7, 2024

Metamates For Ceasefire

Dear Mark Zuckerberg and Leadership, This letter is a follow-up to the letter that was circulated internally on Dec 19, 2023 and deleted and dismissed due to our Community Engagement Expectations (CEE) on what can be discussed internally. Hence, we are sharing our concerns externally. We, Meta employees, wish to express our disappointment and astonishment at the lack of acknowledgement and care the leaders of this company have shown toward the Palestinian community and its allies. In private conversations, we hear from our Palestinian colleagues about family members they have lost in Gaza and family they are working tirelessly to find safety for. However, any open support for our Palestinian colleagues or the millions facing a humanitarian crisis in Palestine is met with internal censorship of employee concerns, biased leadership statements showing one-sided support, and external censorship that is raising public alarm and distrust of our platforms. Internally, we have called out the months of silencing within our workplace forums. While we loudly display “Your voice is valued”, CEE is used as a guise to delete dissenting opinions and silence employees that may simply be seeking solace from their coworkers or raising awareness about building safer products. While in other companies, employees within Employee Resource Groups (ERG) are allowed to connect and speak freely with each other, ERG’s such as Muslims@ and Palestinians@ have faced so much censorship that an employee proposed just deleting the ERG altogether instead of giving the illusion that we can freely build community at Meta. CEE claims to reduce disruptions in our workplace, yet censorship from CEE has caused many of us at Meta to feel disrupted, unheard, and unsafe to the point that several of our Metamates have decided to resign. In the words of our former colleague, any mention of Palestine is taken down - Even when the post was from a colleague expressing their grief. Even when the post was to celebrate the UN International day of support to the Palestinian people. Even when the post is a link to a fundraiser to help the Gazans. Even when asking questions about product bugs that affect Palestinian voices.

One of the original core values of Facebook was to “Be Open” and our current values claim that “We create a culture where we are straightforward and willing to have hard conversations with each other.” Employees have always been first responders to surface issues raised externally to those internally with the power and knowledge to fix them. However when over 450 colleagues came together to sign a letter similar to this one in December, CEE was used to delete the letter and restrict one of the writers from their work devices for over two months while the workplace, product, and policy concerns brought forth were completely ignored. Employees have attempted to raise product concerns related to the conflict only to have their posts and comments censored or dismissed throughout internal channels. Most recently, questions about investigative reports indicating the possibility of governments, ISPs, and coordinated bad actors using Whatsapp data for military targeting have been met with dismissive and insufficient responses or outright deleted throughout internal forums. Meta leaders have posted numerous strong statements of support for our Israeli colleagues along with condemnation of the attack on Israel on October 7th that took the lives of ~1,200 civilians, both on internal and external platforms. Mark stated on his public Facebook - “The terrorist attacks by Hamas are pure evil. There is never any justification for carrying out acts of terrorism against innocent people. The widespread suffering that has resulted is devastating. My focus remains on the safety of our employees and their families in Israel and the region.”

However, bias and inequity is painfully apparent when those same leaders do not similarly share support for our Palestinian colleagues and allies nor condemnation of the attacks on Palestine, which have now taken ~35,000 civilian lives and created a humanitarian crisis of displacement and starvation for ~2 million Palestinians. This has created a hostile and unsafe work environment for hundreds of our Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, anti-Zionist Jew, and anti-genocide colleagues at the company, who have felt consistently alienated and uncomfortable at work. Many have tried to articulate this through posts on Workplace only to be censored, rebuffed, and/or penalized. Feedback shared directly with leadership on Workplace Chat has been met with dismissiveness. Bias and inequity for the human rights and humanitarian crisis in Gaza is also apparent when compared to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, after which there was an outpouring of leadership support on all fronts, including additional resourcing and investment through various social impact initiatives. The lights in the Dublin office were even painted with the colors of the Ukraine flag. Leadership must do better to achieve true equity and inclusion. Externally, when it comes to Palestine, the dismissive tone and lack of investment by Meta is not new and the company has consistently failed to thoroughly take action on years of evidence of suppression of Palestinian voices on our platforms worldwide. In 2024 the company is still slowly addressing the findings of an independent audit influenced by Human Rights Watch’s (HRW) 2021 letter to Meta on the Palestinian conflict 3 years ago. In the wake of October 7th, Meta has ignored reasonable requests for transparency on our content policies from Senator Elizabeth Warren and other lawmakers around the globe. Numerous civil rights organizations, some of whom are Meta partners, have been met with dismissal on the censorship concerns brought forth - leading to external petitions such as one against Meta’s proposed policy of treating “Zionist” as a proxy for "Jewish”, which collected over 52,000 signatures. While Meta denies any Palestinian censorship or bias to the public, internally groups of employee volunteers have found numerous product and policy issues with disparate impacts to Palestinian, Muslim, and Arab communities since October 7th. The few improvements that have been made were achieved only by appealing to isolated product teams, with minimal senior leadership support or resources. Furthermore, in the wake of global criticism of censorship and moderation, leading into the biggest year for democracy in history, Meta has updated its policy to no longer recommend ‘political content’ by default across Instagram and Threads without clear guidelines of how this would impact content originating from global conflict zones. Meta has continued to fail the Palestinian community through its policies and lack of investment.

“Meta.Metamate.Me.” We believe we are all Meta and are committed to respectfully working together to address the issues internally and externally, while holding firmly to the demands we have been echoing for months: We demand an end to censorship - stop deleting employee’s words internally in order to foster an inclusive environment where all communities feel seen, heard, and safe We demand acknowledgment - share internal acknowledgments of support for Palestinian colleagues and acknowledge the lives lost in the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza to recognize our shared humanity We demand transparency and accountability - allocate dedicated resources to investigate issues of censorship and biases on our platforms and openly disclose findings to build trust among employees and the public We implore you to end the silence - issue a public statement urging for an immediate, permanent ceasefire in Gaza As tech workers, we have a tremendous privilege to work on products that serve the world, and with that comes tremendous responsibility. We have been proud to work at Meta – and want to continue believing in its mission to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.

If you're a current or former Meta worker please sign the letter here

Tags

free gaza free palestine palestine current events gaza jerusalem palestine news pro palestine news on gaza news update war on gaza yemen tel aviv war news no tech for apartheid manufactured consent media bias

Wander Over Yonder: Trending 27th (May 2020)

If you could have any one character from outside WOY appear in a single episode, which would it be? / Which cartoon would you see Wander make a cameo in?

Original post (with two cents from me)

Trending 27th (June 2020)

My #savewoy masterpost

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This is a tough question because there are a lot of great potential crossover ideas. However, I’d like to mention a few that I’ve coincidentally been thinking about recently anyway.

First of all, I’d like to see a crossover between “Wander Over Yonder” and “Zig & Sharko” due to the many parallels I’ve been able to draw between the two.

In case you don’t know, “Zig & Sharko” is a a French animated slapstick comedy television series created and directed by Olivier Jean-Marie and produced by Xilam Animation (known for creating other successful series such as “Space Goofs” and “Oggy and the Cockroaches”). It shares the first two genres with WOY and has many similar character archetypes.

Both cartoons have a "bad guy” who wants to kill a “good guy”.

Both bad guys have small sidekicks that are underappreciated by them and are also way smarter, making most of the plans and generally doing all the work.

Both good guys wear a star as their head accessory (in Marina’s case, it’s the starfish hairpin, and in Wander’s, it’s the star is attached to his hat) and are oftentimes (at least seemingly) oblivious to the bad guys’ attempts to destroy them.

Both of them also find the bad guy’s right hand man adorable.

And finally, the good guy also has a strong companion who protects them and who they are very close to.

I haven’t watched all the episodes of “Zig & Sharko”, but if I did, there would most likely be even more parallels I could draw. I would also like to see this crossover because the characters from Z&S don’t talk, so watching the characters from WOY try to communicate with them non-verbally (or watching the characters from Z&S talk for once, allowing the audience to find out what their canon voices would sound like) would be very interesting to me.

Second of all, I’d like to include an honorary mention.

While it’s not a cartoon, I’d really like to see a crossover between the characters from “Wander Over Yonder” and the “Patapon” franchise.

If you don’t know, Patapon is a series of video games published originally for the PlayStation Portable (PSP) handheld game console combining gameplay features of a rhythm game and a god game. The title is created from two Japanese onomatopoeia (the process of creating a word that phonetically imitates, resembles, or suggests the sound that it describes), pata (marching) and pon (drumming).

The game is presented in a cartoonish, silhouetted two-dimensional environment, and features the player acting as a deity who commands an army of caricatured miniature tribal creatures by beating traditional talking drums. The game was developed by Pyramid and produced by Japan Studios.

It has two sequels, with Patapon 3 being the conclusion to the series (just like season 3 of WOY was supposed to be - third time’s the charm!). Additionally, the first 2 games were remastered in 2017 and 2020 for the PlayStation 4 (PS 4). Despite this, the series is still fairly underrated, and I urge you to check it out!

The “Patapon” franchise features characters that are very similar to watchdogs in that they are an army of talking eyeballs, most of whom are male.

Additionally, they are led by a (generally) smart leader - Meden in “Patapon” and Peepers in “Wander Over Yonder” - who can be differentiated from the rest of their species by their height (Meden is taller thanks to her legs, whereas Peepers is shorter) and their head accessory (Meden has an elaborate headdress of five coloured feathers instead of a usual cap or helm, and Peepers has a differently shaped helmet with a bigger lightning bolt than normal).

All 3 games even have characters shaped as stars (which is a reocurring symbol in Wander Over Yonder)! They’re called Hoshipon (“Hoshi” (星) means “star” in Japanese).

That’s just some of the things I could think of off the top of my head! I might go into more details about the similarities between the aforementioned franchises specifically later, as well as draw fanart and/or write fanfiction based on my observations, too.

This is it for now, though! I hope you enjoyed. Please consider participating in the “Trending 27th” event if you haven’t already!

@disneyxd

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shv2

1 year ago

Commander Peepers:

Tags

I LOVE IT wander over yonder woy It's just so in-character for no reason I swear I can hear his voice in my head when I read it

7 notes View Post

shv2

4 years ago

I’m thinking about the ending of WOY Season 2 because it’s one of the most exciting things in the whole series. AND HERE’S WHY.

In the episode “The Waste of Time” there is a quick shot of a character called Monkeyboy when Wander & Sylvia are going back in time. The shot is implied to be from an event that happened before the start of the series. Frank Angones confirmed his name and revealed that he was intended to play a “big part” in season 3.

The character’s relevancy is further established by the cliffhanger ending of season 2. An American flag can be seen on both the escape pod from the ending and the monkey’s astronaut suit. Those are some strong parallels that I’m sure most people in the fandom have picked up on by now. It’s hard to ignore because we have NEVER seen evidence that Earth exists in the show aside from these two instances! That alone makes me excited!

But wait, there’s more! The final shot shows green electricity coming out of the crashed escape pod, along with monkey noises that transition into Hater’s evil laugh. This leads me to believe that Hater’s origin story is somehow tied to Monkeyboy. And revealing something big like that about a main character would be totally new territory for the show! One popular theory is that he IS Monkeyboy, or was. I can see that being true since Craig McCracken has a track record with villainous monkey characters.

This may be purposefully misleading, however, because how could Monkeyboy play a big part in season 3 if he was only found within Hater’s backstory? Another theory I have is that Hater and Monkeyboy knew each other at one point, exploring space together, until Hater betrayed him. That way Monkeyboy could show up to take his revenge against Hater in season 3. He looks fairly pissed off in that one image we see of him.

Maybe in the past they were both monkeys or maybe Hater was a human astronaut with a monkey companion. There are many possible ways it could go, but even putting aside all the fan speculation, I love that this new character is based on the actual history of space travel. From 1948 to 1993, monkeys and chimps were routinely launched into space by the USA. It was incredibly dangerous for the animals involved since they were the first to test the equipment. Looking back at the screenshots, I wonder if the spacecraft that Monkeyboy (and maybe Hater) was in simply malfunctioned or if there was another element at play.

67 notes View Post

shv2

1 year ago

Noor Harazeen you are the world's hero. You're completely correct, this is not normal. This is evil and no human needs to make these decisions.

47K notes View Post

shv2

1 year ago

REMINDER: russia still occupies parts of georgia and ukraine since 2008 and 2014, respectively.

Tags

украрт ukraine georgia україна укртумбочка укртамблер арткозацтво kyitsyart საქართველოს

3K notes View Post

shv2

1 year ago

Papyrus using his cape to hold a Palestine flag.

Undertale Artists for Palestine! CAMPAIGN FOR PCRF.

Undertale Artists for Palestine!

If you pay a dollar you donate, one of us will draw something for 5 minutes.

The drawing request will only be available until May 31st. Feel free to donate all the funds will go straight to Palestine's Child Relief Funds.

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Awesome Artist who are helping:

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Please be patient with your request, this is all volunteer work, be aware most of us don't have much free time or money ourselves!

If there are any questions, or if you want to help volunteer as well. Feel free to leave a message on this account or email undertaleforpalestine@gmail.com. Thank you!