While some of Facebook’s top executives have already spoken out against President Trump’s immigration moratorium, other company employees are protesting the ban by boycotting flying.
A handful of Facebook employees have committed to either fly less or completely boycott flying for the next 90 days in protest of Trump’s order, which bars people from seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the US for 90 days and bars the admission of all refugees for 120 days.
The protest was organized by Facebook vice president of engineering Regina Dugan, according to a post on her Facebook page Friday. Dugan was poached by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg from Google in early 2016 to lead the social giant’s mysterious Building 8 hardware division.
“Last Sunday, I felt heartbroken,” Dugan wrote Friday in reference to Trump’s executive order. “And I decided that I had to do something. Before I knew it, a small rag tag team of citizen coders had formed. A designer made a logo. We put down words, took shifts, encouraged each other through sleepless nights. Two days later, nofly90.com was live.”
Dugan’s website explains that the boycott is intended to make a statement “that is hard to ignore.”
“Approximately 2 million people fly each day in the United States,” it reads. “If one out of every ten of those people boycott air travel for 90 days, it will make a $ 5B statement. And that is a roar that is hard to ignore.”
“The boycott of public buses in Montgomery lasted 381 days,” the website continues. “Now it is our turn.”
Some Facebook employees, including several who work within Dugan’s Building 8 division, have shared the website with the hashtag “#nofly90.” Employees from Google and other tech companies have also shared the hashtag.
A Facebook spokesperson told Business Insider that the company wasn’t affiliated with Dugan’s protest and that no company resources were used to create the website.
Mark Zuckerberg was one of first in a long string of tech CEOs to speak out against Trump’s order last week. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg later came out and said that the ban defies “the heart and values that define the best of our nation.”
