What’s Missing From Mark Zuckerberg’s Memo on Peter Thiel

It was time to address the “questions and concerns about Peter Thiel as a board member and Trump supporter,” Zuckerberg wrote in the memo, which was leaked to the website Hacker News. Keeping Thiel on the board was a reflection of Facebook’s commitment to diversity, Zuckerberg explained. “We can’t create a culture that says it cares about diversity and then excludes almost half the country because they back a political candidate...” he wrote. “Our community will be stronger for all our differences—not only in areas like race and gender, but also in areas like political ideology and religion.”(A spokesperson for Facebook confirmed to me that the leaked memo, pictured below, is authentic.)

What remains surprising is that the world’s largest publisher refuses to acknowledge the business it’s really in. Facebook has not yet come to terms with its own power or, for that matter, with Thiel’s. Facebook tells the world that it’s a champion of the free press. And now it is telling its shareholders, users, and employees that Facebook stands by a man proud to shut those freedoms down.