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Comment by mountainriver | Hacker News Reader

Was he really pushed out of Facebook for being a Trump supporter?

Why he was pushed out was never confirmed. For "being a Trump supporter" makes for a nice counter-culture story, but doesn't make much sense given how openly Peter Theil campaigned for Trump.

yeah it seems like a spun narrative, curious what actually happened

He was funding a Pro-Trump, Anti-Hillary Clinton troll campaign [1], which drew a lot of controversy, as the early Oculus VR audience (developers and technologists) were demographically opposed to that type of ideology.

I think he was fired because he was generating a lot of negative press/attention for what was at that time a burgeoning VR project dependent on adoption by a crowd that largely wasn't a fan of his political leanings...basically office politics.

But...he was fired with a $100 million severance [2], so it's not much of a pity situation.

1 - https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/09/reven...

2- https://www.fastcompany.com/90266150/zuck-pressured-facebook...

Yeah I thought they were all about Trump supporters there, or at least their old ad team.

I think FB was more politically even than people like to imagine it. Seems like Democrats think FB was practically, moustache twirlingly, 'in on' Jan 6. Meanwhile, all the conservatives seem to believe FB is out to get them, banning them from platforms and hypnotizing people to be trans.

As someone who has minimized Facebook use for years and cultivated some political distance (neither party represents my views much at all), I think FB was mostly "keep your hands off except to feed people more of the things they click"

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