Planes are often used to communicate – whether it’s a message of love in skywriting, or perhaps a banner advertising a new beer campaign.
That wasn’t quite the case Tuesday morning.
At 11 a.m., a small prop plane started flying over Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters dragging a banner behind it saying, "KEEPTRUMPOFFFACEBOOK.com."
The plane circled the campus for an hour.
The driving force behind the banner message is left-leaning nonprofit Media Matters for America, which acts as a watchdog group for right-wing media outlets. The banner’s message was meant for Facebook employees, to encourage them to speak out against the recent decision to ban former President Donald Trump from the app for two years.
The website believes that two years is not enough, and the ban should be permanent. It includes an open letter that details Trump’s abuse of the platform signed by several nonprofit advocacy groups, such as Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, Inc., that was sent last week to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
The letter also ran as a full-page ad in the San Jose Mercury News.
"Facebook employees are out of excuses for not making more noise about the platform’s complicity in fomenting violence and extremism," said Media Matters President and CEO Angelo Carusone.
"Their own colleagues have been leaking comments to reporters about how this is ridiculous, and I’m sure a lot of them feel that way," Carusone added.
Facebook has acknowledged Trump’s controversy on their platform, but argued that the former president’s current ban is as "proportionate, fair and transparent a way as possible," said Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs in a blog post to the site.
"When the suspension is eventually lifted, there will be a strict set of rapidly escalating sanctions that will be triggered if Mr. Trump commits further violations in future, up to and including permanent removal of his pages and accounts," Clegg added.
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