After posting an article criticizing Facebook’s lack of diversity and treatment of black users, the company’s former partnerships manager Mark Luckie received a notification saying that his post had been removed.

“Facebook has a black people problem,” Luckie said in his memo.

The memo was originally sent as an internal email to each Facebook employee and later published on the platform.

Luckie told AfroTech he was caught off-guard when he received the notification and that he was able to laugh at the irony of the situation.

“I was experiencing some of the same issues I was helping Black influencers with,” Luckie said. “Users are at the mercy of Facebook.”

“Mark Luckie’s post does not violate our Community Standards and is available on our site,” Facebook spokesperson Anthony Harrison said. “We are looking into what happened.”

The post has since been put back on the website, but its removal emphasizes one of Luckie’s key points.

“Black people are finding that their attempts to create “safe spaces” on Facebook for conversation among themselves are being derailed by the platform itself,” Luckie said in the memo. “Non-black people are reporting what are meant to be positive efforts as hate speech, despite them often not violating Facebook’s terms of service. Their content is removed without notice. Accounts are suspended indefinitely.”

Joseph Dixon, the founder of dating app RealBlackLove Inc., said that Facebook forced him to change his group’s name because it violated the platform’s Community Standards on hate speech.

“We made a Facebook group so that our singles can discuss dating,” Dixon said.

Dixon said that he changed the name of the group from “RealBlackLove Singles” to “Singles of Facebook.” He said that he searched through similar Facebook groups and found hundreds that targeted different demographics.

“It’s just terrible and unfair,” Dixon said.

As Facebook investigates why Luckie received a removal notification, the former employee said the company needs to amend its algorithm, which “hasn’t shown a lot of movement.”

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