House of Representatives
- During the House Judiciary Committee's hearing on social media content filtering, three protestors held up signs during the testimony of Monika Bickert, Facebook's head of global policy management.
- The images appeared to depict Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's CEO, and Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's COO, as two heads on an octopus with its legs stretched around a globe.
- There is a URL at the bottom of the image — which appears to lead to the website belonging to a group called 'Freedom from Facebook.'
Shortly after Facebook's head of global policy Monika Bickert's testimony began at the House Judiciary Committee's hearing on social media content filtering, three protestors held up images behind her.
The small posters appeared to depict Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's CEO, and Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's COO, as two heads on an octopus with its legs stretched around a globe.
The protestors silently held the images for a few seconds, which was available on the livestream of the event.
Chairman Bob Goodlatte then interrupted Bickert, and asked the protestors to stop — which they did, and then left the hearing.
There was a URL at the bottom of the images the protestors held up, which appeared to led to www.freedomfromfb.com, a website owned by the group 'Freedom from Facebook,' which describes Facebook as a monopoly and urges site visitors to sign a petition asking the Federal Trade Commission to break it up.
Tweet Embed://twitter.com/mims/statuses/1019226117826199552?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Facebook exec Monika Bickert began her testimony in front of the House Judiciary committee just now. Three members of the crowd sitting behind her held up images of Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg as a two-headed octopus sitting on the globe. pic.twitter.com/v1pheOHJ87Tweet Embed:
//twitter.com/mims/statuses/1019230378442219520?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Looks like this is the group that was running the protest. https://t.co/j7smfR9DDN
Some suggested that the images were anti-semetic — the image of an octopus stretched around the world has been used to depict Jewish people in anti-semetic cartoons in the past.
Tweet Embed://twitter.com/mims/statuses/1019229903923892224?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
I'd love to think it's just ignorance here, but I'm not a fan of people protesting two Jewish Facebook execs by invoking a classic antisemitic trope https://t.co/eg6qz53UjiTweet Embed:
//twitter.com/mims/statuses/1019228105389600770?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
The old Jews-as-world-strangling-octopus move https://t.co/RdFtpRD4is
Ryan Mac, a tech reporter for BuzzFeed, said he spoke to one of the women who held the signs up — and she said it was a reference to an anti-Standard Oil cartoon, and said it wasn't intended to be anti-semetic.
Tweet Embed://twitter.com/mims/statuses/1019238250064461824?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
I talked to one of the women who held up a sign and asked if the photo was meant to be anti-semitic, as some have suggested on Twitter. She said "of course not" and said it was meant to be a play on a depiction of Standard Oil. pic.twitter.com/x4f7ghU2Dg
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