Silicon Valley CEO Slams WSJ Over Editorial About Charleston: ‘F**k You’

Choosing a fitting communication platform to underscore his Silicon Valley background, Flickr-cofounder-turned-Slack-CEO Stewart Butterfield excoriated The Wall Street Journal editorial staff in a series of tweets Sunday evening.

The WSJ’s right-leaning editorial board drew Butterfield’s eye, ire and fire with an opinion piece published last Thursday about the hate-fueled shooting that claimed the lives of nine African-Americans on June 17 at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C.

“It is inevitable that when nine black men and women are shot to death inside their church by a 21-year-old white man in Charleston, S.C., the issue of race in America will be raised,” the Journal’s piece began, before reaching the baldly inaccurate conclusion that “[t]oday the system and philosophy of institutionalized racism identified by Dr. [Martin Luther] King no longer exists.”

Granted, it has gotten to the point where readers are obliged to take an extra step on their end to most accurately access the true meaning of the WSJ’s editorial articles — one that involves tacking the phrase “for The Wall Street Journal’s editorial staff” or “for Rupert Murdoch” onto the end of bewildering statements such as that last quote cited above.

However, Butterfield was inspired to go even further by pulling the curtain aside to expose the inner workings of Murdoch’s machinery in his takedown on Twitter. “I get that it’s a business & this is something like professional wrestling or reality TV. WSJ editorials are meant to be spectacle,” Butterfield began.

After zooming in on the article’s pronouncement that the U.S. has moved on from its racist past, the Slack exec continued: “Pretending it doesn’t exist is, cognitively, really hard work. And it is dishonest and unfair and cruel work too. It’s its own violence.”

Butterfield laid out his argument insistently before reaching a point where civil discourse apparently no longer served his cause.

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–Posted by Kasia Anderson