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Internal Facebook posts of employees discussing leaked memo

• theabacus 9y ago
  I love the internal attitude here. Everyone is (at least portrayed) to be assuming that the leakers were being "evil". One think I've been taught is to assume everyone's intentions are the best they could be (aside from the reality of what they are), and I always try to put this into practice. It seems like the attitude is "everyone-is-out-to-get-me".
• meitham 9y ago
  Facebook employees are perfectly suitable to work in spy organisations, such as in the NSA. They seem to all agree on “punish the leaker” attitude, instead of self reforms!
• shanghaiaway 9y ago
  The leaker simply "connected" Facebook to the outside world.
  • creo 9y ago
    Yes! Well said.
  • phkahler 9y ago
    Here the employees thought they were just sharing among "friends" and someone went and used their information for other purposes.
• gaius 9y ago
  “This is so disappointing, wonder if there is a way to hire for integrity. We are probably focusing on the intelligence part and getting smart people here who lack a moral compass and loyalty.” The sheer lack of self-awareness in that statement.
  • aserafini 9y ago
    It's breathtaking isn't it? Facebook sells personal information to advertisers. And this employee worries there might be 'smart people who lack a moral compass' working there? It would be funny if it wasn't also terrifying that Facebook employees believe the company is a force for good in the world. Working for Facebook is about as moral as working for Big Tobacco: there's plenty of evidence the product is actively harmful.
    • jameslk 9y ago
      Where can I purchase some Facebook personal information? I'd love to use it for some custom audiences on my ads. /s As far as I'm aware, Facebook has never sold personal information to advertisers[0], because that would be giving away its crown jewels. It might leak it, but doesn't hand it out for sale. EDIT: Downvoters, please point out where I'm wrong. It looks bad for the community to suppress factual statements. 0. https://www.facebook.com/help/152637448140583 https://www.facebook.com/help/152637448140583
      • wilonth 9y ago
        I think he means indirectly sell, which is kinda true. By letting the CA scandal happen, they seriously sold a lot of data. Not what they really wanted to do, but their reckless policies and vague morality standard caused that. Also, nothing changes the fact that Facebook is clearly harmful to the society in important ways, according to various researches. And they do not care about this fundamental issue, they just want more users and more profit.
        • overeater 9y ago
          I feel like these are weasel words, and I could use the same argument about anything. I could say Clinton let the email scandal happen. Or that Clinton indirectly leaked classified emails, which is kinda true. Or someone can say Clinton is clearly harmful to society in important ways, according to various sources. Clinton just wants more votes and power. I think we should stick with the facts to make a strong argument against Facebook.
• throwawayface 9y ago
  i admit i do not know the whole story, however bosworth's memo sounds very cultish: > That conversation is now gone. And I won’t be the one to bring it back for fear it will be misunderstood by a broader population that doesn’t have full context on who we are and how we work. > This is the very real cost of leaks. We had a sensitive topic that we could engage on openly and explore even bad ideas, even if just to eliminate them. If we have to live in fear that even our bad ideas will be exposed then we won’t explore them or understand them as such, we won’t clearly label them as such, we run a much greater risk of stumbling on them later. Conversations go underground or don’t happen at all. And not only are we worse off for it, so are the people who use our products. this sets facebook as the chosen ones or saviors of the people. and of course the commoners dont understand and cannot be privy to these esoteric methods.
• pdkl95 9y ago
  > Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, a vice president at Facebook ~sigh~ "Boz" is the only person I regret introducing to programming. (I convinced him to attend the 4-H project where I taught BASIC)
  • dpflan 9y ago
    Do you still teach? I ask because when I obtained my C.S. degree, the curriculum required that students take a course that focused on ethics, entitled: Computing, Society, & Professionalism [1.]. I think this would be hard to squeeze into a BASIC course, but discussing the implications of use/abuse of technology is valuable. [1.] https://www.cc.gatech.edu/fac/Amy.Bruckman/teaching/4001/fall2017/index.html https://www.cc.gatech.edu/fac/Amy.Bruckman/teaching/4001/fal...
    • bordercases 9y ago
      Not many students see their ethics course as anything more than a writing credit, with some resentment.
      • dpflan 9y ago
        I agree. It feels forced. But exposure is important.
  • sifoo 9y ago
    Don't bother; he's playing his part perfectly so far, which means that so did you. If we can keep this shit storm going for a month or so, Zuckerbot Inc. is going down; and I have a feeling your student will do his best to help with that.
  • sah2ed 9y ago
    Would love to hear why you have such regrets?
    • yid 9y ago
      There may be a clue in the story we’re commenting on.
• avoidit 9y ago
  1. Bosworth's reaction:"for fear it will be misunderstood by a broader population that doesn’t have full context on who we are and how we work" 2. Wrote another: “How fucking terrible that some irresponsible jerk decided he or she had some god complex that jeopardizes our inner culture and something that makes Facebook great?” 3. Back to Bosworth: "The post was of no particular consequence in and of itself, it was the comments that were impressive." (italics mine) 4. And lastly: " If we have to live in fear that even our bad ideas will be exposed then we won’t explore them or understand them as such, we won’t clearly label them as such, we run a much greater risk of stumbling on them later. Conversations go underground or don’t happen at all. And not only are we worse off for it, so are the people who use our products." (italics mine) In other words: 1. we know better than you 2. the ends do justify the means (contrary to MZ's opinion) 3. don't mind the contents, just notice how smart the employees are 4. let us tell you what is best for you
  • evrydayhustling 9y ago
    The comments quoted are pretty shill-ish... but I found myself weirdly sympathetic to Bosworth's concern about leaks. If corporations are people, than their internal communications are like thoughts floating around before a decision is made. If you're properly distributing decision making in a company, individual sections are going to come up with ideas that are embarrassing in the big picture! Would you want your stray thoughts picked apart in the press? BUUUUUUT (a) Bosworth is at the top of his org, so calling his own post a "not quite staw man" is a ridiculous cop-out. Like it doesn't have 1000x the weight of the comments below. And (b) The reason people are being forced to interrogate Facebook's "character" through internal docs is because a lack of candor has made that character impossible to judge based on public statements and actions. You did it to yourself, man!
    • Jedd 9y ago
      > If corporations are people ... But they're not, of course. Sure, I don't want my internal thoughts floating around, but I'm not a) several thousand people, and b) the personification of those several thousand people attempting to work out the best way of extracting other people's sub-conscious & internal motivations and desires, and sell them to marketers ... so my perspective is skewed. The rest of the excuses in TFA seem very 'some people say...' or 'it's been said that...' style posturing, which may be an interesting academic exercise, but as you say it feels a bit of a cop-out to use that as a post-rationalisation.
• Veen 9y ago
  From the outside, this all seems rather cultish. Are Facebook employees so convinced of the nobility of the company, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary? It brings to mind the famous Upton Sinclair quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
  • alexandercrohde 9y ago
    Or maybe they're just all pretending to, because they're all saying this in the company facebook discussion, knowing it's trackable back to them, so they're trying to prove loyalty. It's a disconcerting system.
  • munificent 9y ago
    > Are Facebook employees so convinced of the nobility of the company, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary At best, we only have evidence that the subset of employees who chose to comment on that internal thread and whose comment was chosen by the journalist to be included in the article feel this way. One of the things that media and aggregation have really accelerated is the cognitive fallacy where we assume the most interesting data points are the most frequent when in reality the inverse is almost always true — common is boring. If you were to go by the news, men bite dogs way more often than dogs bite men. But that's only because "man bites dog" is worth reporting and "dog bites man" is not.
  • eli_gottlieb 9y ago
    I thought the point of "culture fit" was to make sure one only hires employees who truly believe in the company and its ~~religion~~mission.
  • conanbatt 9y ago
    > in spite of all the evidence to the contrary? evidence of the contrary? What is your evidence to measure the value of Facebook is not outweighted by its costs?
  • Antifragile1 9y ago
    Just because a bunch of idiots on the internet are convinced that FB did something wrong by creating a platform to target ads... which in turn led to takedown of their crooked hag in the election, it doesn't mean all FB employees will buy into that nonsense. These "concerns" were never hidden from anyone.
• speedplane 9y ago
  I'm kind of amazed over the attention FB is receiving over the data leak and their general attitude over privacy. They have been incredibly clear that they don't value privacy at all, Zuck even said so years ago. - They have a huge spam-bot problem that they willfully ignore; - use aggressive email and notification technique to re-engage users; - stone-wall traditional publishers to accommodate their distribution techniques - sell and trade personal user information for advertising - Have most security and privacy settings buried under submenus, almost intentionally built to ignore - Have a history of shady apps and games on their systems with questionable value to the user - Have a culture of growth at all costs, without regard to the substance of that growth. All of the above was known for years, has nothing to do with the recent breach or 2016's election. I just can't understand why this is a surprise or why we should trust a word FB says.
  • gaius 9y ago
    Zuck even said so years ago. Zuck also got a free pass on his “young people are smarter” comments. I hope the rampant ageism catches up with FB too.
    • speedplane 9y ago
      Exactly. Sure, he put out a press release and some PR moves "expressing regret" of his "word choice", but does he really regret or care? Impossible to tell when he is sincere, impossible to trust him.
• alexandercrohde 9y ago
  It's kinda ironic that a post about "All we are doing is connecting people and information" gets deleted because it gets connected to a lot of people ("leaked"). You can't simultaneously hold the opinion that there's no harm in sharing information, while also holding the opinion that there is such thing as a "leak." It just strikes me as so ironic for a company that champions "privacy is dead, live with it," to have to delete its own valid internal debates because of the consequences of lack of privacy (i.e. leak = lack of privacy).
  • paws 9y ago
    You may find it additionally ironic that about a month before the Boz memo, it was reported[1] that Zuck bought 4 houses located around his own for $30 million. Privacy is looking pretty alive in that neighborhood. [1] http://time.com/money/4346766/mark-zuckerberg-houses/ http://time.com/money/4346766/mark-zuckerberg-houses/
    • thaumaturgy 9y ago
      Zuckerberg built a 6 foot wall around his 700-acre estate in Hawaii because he values his own privacy that much: http://www.newsweek.com/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-wall-hawaii-protest-549068 http://www.newsweek.com/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-wall-hawaii...
      • mistermann 9y ago
        If it wasn't for the unearned and unnassailable value of the network effect Facebook benefits from, this disgusting behavior (from Zuck and his minions) would be enough to drive everyone to a new platform.
  • notacoward 9y ago
    > You can't simultaneously hold the opinion that there's no harm in sharing information, while also holding the opinion that there is such thing as a "leak. Likewise, you can't simultaneously hold the opinion that users should have control over where their content is seen, and that it's OK to publish and comment on an internal post. In a less spiteful world, some of the employees' reactions might have been taken as evidence that they do understand and care about issues of privacy or containment. Maybe that would lead to more collaboration on solutions, which is necessary because there are actually some tricky tradeoffs here. But that doesn't give the same dopamine hit as cutting down the tall poppies, right?
• DanielBMarkham 9y ago
  There are many, including those inside Facebook, that are actively asking for more federal regulations. I don't do regulation discussions. Brings out too much stupid. But I will say that this is a survival ploy. If you get regulated, you are now approved by the government. You're good to go, able to operate freely in society. You just have to abide by whatever the regulations are. Facebook may have a business model that just doesn't work in a society that values privacy, anonymity, and small diverse groups of people with widely-varying mores. This seems to be the lesson Facebook itself is learning now about, well, Facebook. What do we do then? It's not like anybody at Facebook is going to bring that up. They've got a ton of money. What do we do if the existence of Facebook itself is unacceptable?
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• thisisit 9y ago
  > “All the subtle language that helps people stay searchable by friends. All of the work we do to bring more communication in. The work we will likely have to do in China some day. All of it.” In China? Really? > Another theory floated by multiple employees is that Facebook has been targeted by spies or state-level actors hoping to embarrass the company. Still want to work in China?
• mratzloff 9y ago
  Facebook employees outraged their privacy was violated
• phkahler 9y ago
  The irony and hypocrisy in this are stunning.
• wbronitsky 9y ago
  From the original post by "Boz"[0]: > Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools. And we still connect people This guy is a VP at Facebook. Words mean things and his words have weight within the company. This alone disgusts me. He could have easily taken the other side of the argument to stir debate and chose not to. > Leakers, please resign instead of sabotaging the company I think the level of hubris espoused by these Facebook employees is a much better reason to delete Facebook than anything I've seen so far. In fact, although the data we have gotten is incomplete, it seems to possibly be the general feeling. The focus on growth and profit over any thought of doing the right thing is actually evil, especially when one recognizes that evil is being done. This company is no longer a small company built out of a dorm room. It is a massive publicly traded company that has revenues and active users in the billions. Despite the current climate, words actually have meaning, especially words greatly amplified on these tools, and these actions have real consequences. [0] https://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanmac/growth-at-any-cost-top-facebook-executive-defended-data https://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanmac/growth-at-any-cost-top-face...
  • hypertexthero 9y ago
    He does seem like a bit of a bully himself: http://boz.com/articles/be-kind.html http://boz.com/articles/be-kind.html
    • sah2ed 9y ago
      Not cool. You comment descends a bit into ad hominem territory. That blog post was basically Boz publicly acknowledging a personal flaw he hadn't been aware of up until his interaction with Dustin. In other words, calling him a mean co-worker in 2008 would be an accurate characterization, if we rely on his recollection of events when Dustin was still Facebook CTO. Calling him a mean co-worker now would be an unfair characterization. FWIW, Jeff Bezos told a similar story of how he became aware of his meanness to his grandmother in a commencement address in 2010, though in his own case he was a 10 yo boy when he came to that realization. [0]. [0] https://www.princeton.edu/news/2010/05/30/2010-baccalaureate-remarks https://www.princeton.edu/news/2010/05/30/2010-baccalaureate...
• Tistel 9y ago
  Growth at all cost. What a dipshit. That corporation is reading cancer’s playbook.
  • deleted 9y ago
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  • deleted 9y ago
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• draw_down 9y ago
  These people are nuts. Equating leaking memos to wife beating and the rest. Shameful.
• BoorishBears 9y ago
  This memo is being totally overblown. It’s like a telephone company admitting their services will be used to call in bomb threats, coordinate terrorist attacks, conduct verbal abuse, but that they should stay steadfast in their mission to provide communication to people for the greater good that comes of it. It’s a little tacky, but past the last thing on a long list of wrongs Facebook has committed for so many words to be shed over.
  • JumpCrisscross 9y ago
    > This memo is being totally overblown The memo may be. The reaction is not. This is not a culture that is willing to be critical of itself. These problems will recur until we break the company up.
  • cryptoz 9y ago
    > questionable contact importing practices If your phone company had suggested it used morally wrong and potentially illegal tactics to get your private contact information, and equal uproar would ensue. > The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good. This is literal insanity. Of course this is a big deal. This man writes that he thinks there is almost literally nothing, legal or not, outside the company's willingness to grow exclusively to earn more money. Accepting murder, terrorism, death, just to grow and earn more money? Fuck that man, he's evil and the memo is written to sound as evil as possible. It's sick and it's wrong and it's a lot more than a little tacky. Facebook has no desire to help you or your friends connect. Facebook has no desire to keep you safe or keep you a customer. They want your friends as customers and they don't care if you die as a result. It almost sounds in the memo like this crazy person wanted someone to die, it's super weird with the fixation on " even some DEATH won't stop us now!" uh okay, sounds like a nice man. The man says "the truth...we believe in.." and then says later he never believed in it, claims himself that he's a liar and a cheat. He is obviously not mentally well and cannot be trusted to do any real work, especially the kind that has dramatic effect on the lives of 2B people.
    • icebraining 9y ago
• marricks 9y ago
  The Guardian has a piece that discussed the FB employees reaction to this leak and it was down right scary. Many calls for hiring workers "with integrity" on talking about how this leak was destroying FB's perception as a great place to work. How scary it must be to work at a place with such an overwhelming "don't rock the boat" mentality. Leakers everywhere, and Google, FB, and Apple especially risk their jobs and their career to give the public an open look at places which hold overwhelming power over our personal lives. FB's internal perspective on privacy and goals are vital for the public to know, it shouldn't take the next massive breach of trust to trigger an investigation to learn the detais. A leaker, sorry, I mean someone "without integrity", in 2016 could have done a lot of good.
  • JustSomeNobody 9y ago
    Most companies have held internal memos like this as private to the organization. Any breach of that is a firing offense. FB, Google, Apple, etc. are not doing anything that corporate America hasn't been doing for ... for I don't know how long. It is disconcerting how FB employees have come out in support of these ideas from the memo, though.
    • marricks 9y ago
      I think big tech has it very different, given how much they know about their personal employees lives. Some information should leak within a healthy society so backlash and corrections can occur before an election might be compromised by a horrific breach. For a view on what's different an excerpt from a Guardian piece is below. --- “It’s horrifying how much they know,” he told the Guardian, on the condition of anonymity. “You go into Facebook and it has this warm, fuzzy feeling of ‘we’re changing the world’ and ‘we care about things’. But you get on their bad side and all of a sudden you are face to face with [Facebook CEO] Mark Zuckerberg’s secret police.” The public image of Silicon Valley’s tech giants is all colourful bicycles, ping-pong tables, beanbags and free food, but behind the cartoonish facade is a ruthless code of secrecy. They rely on a combination of Kool-Aid, digital and physical surveillance, legal threats and restricted stock units to prevent and detect intellectual property theft and other criminal activity. However, those same tools are also used to catch employees and contractors who talk publicly, even if it’s about their working conditions, misconduct or cultural challenges within the company. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/16/silicon-valley-internal-work-spying-surveillance-leakers https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/16/silicon-v...
• bkohlmann 9y ago
  Provocative ideas are critical to discovering truths that consensus won't find. The reason Facebook (and many successful tech companies) is successful is because they relentlessly experiment and iterate, killing off ideas that don't gain traction while embracing those that do. Often times the ideas that do get traction are unexpected, but revealed because of a culture that allows any idea to be thrown into the dialogue. If you can't say something provocative without fear of it later coming back to haunt you, folks will be less likely to raise uncomfortable, or non-consensus, ideas. This will lead to less innovation. It's also okay if it's wrong. And if it is wrong, folks should be willing to push back. That's how a high-functioning, ideas driven organizations thrives.
  • heavenlyblue 9y ago
    Theranos have innovated themselves to oblivion. We must learn that there's a definite line between innovating and blatantly generating noise for the sake of new noise (also supported by inverstors).
    • bkohlmann 9y ago
      Societal utility is a weighted average. Any worthwhile process will have positive and negative outcomes. Those that endure will provide greater upside than downside. I believe that a process where any idea is given consideration is preferable to one in which ideas are suppressed. We need all the "bad" ideas to discover the "good" ones.
      • heavenlyblue 9y ago
        A process where any idea is always given consideration is naturally highly vulnerable to sybil attacks. For example, there's a reason why once upon a time we had agreed (as a society) to never accept any new potents for perpetual motion machines - because the only ideas that were left are the bad ones, and we can prove it. Now if there comes a time in history when the laws of physics suddenly discover something new - we may re-approach our decision. But I don't think many educated people believe it's going to happen anytime soon.
• TAForObvReasons 9y ago
  > "Leakers, please resign instead of sabotaging the company," So are the employees upset about the "growth at all costs" mentality, or upset that it was laid bare?
  • pishpash 9y ago
    Upset that their options are worth less than before.
• NDizzle 9y ago
  What material is "the bubble" made out of if Facebook employees immediately jump to "spies" when it comes to leaking something like this? Has it been so long since they've had contact with soul-containing humans that they forgot how they operated?! Zucker-bot must be replicating ye olde FB HQ.
  • sidlls 9y ago
    Well, selection bias aside consider that Facebook (along with the other Big Tech firms) have for years now engaged in a hiring process that specifically targets fresh young graduates who are told they have to absolutely be the best of the best to get through an interview process. "Cult" is the word that comes to mind when I think of the hiring practices and cultures at these companies. It shouldn't be surprising when a substantial number of them have this attitude.
  • zjaffee 9y ago
    I think was sidlls said is certainly true, but it's important to remember that media organizations like to focus on things that would be interesting to their readers. Yes, this cultish behavior is real, but I'm sure there are just as many jaded employees or else this leak would never have happened.
  • thomble 9y ago
    Frankly, it sounds like a cult.
  • ggggtez 9y ago
    I don't think it's fair to say the entire company believe it was spies. Clearly a lot think it was just a few jerks. That said, FB is almost certainly infiltrated by a few governments. It's not exactly a small company. If China wanted to get someone on the inside, it couldn't be that hard. But IMO, this was just an employee who admires Snowden.
    • username223 9y ago
      > just a few jerks. Where by "jerks" you mean "people with deep misgivings and the courage to risk their careers by speaking out against one of the world's premier surveillance organizations?" This isn't the kind of thing you do for lulz, and I doubt they're getting paid.
• djhworld 9y ago
  Nice to see that instead of trying to question why the memo was leaked, some are blaming the leaker
  • hoppelhase 9y ago
    Same counts for Snowden.
• kerng 9y ago
  Wow, as according to this leadership was fully aware that collecting cell phone contact data is unethical, but they did it anyway because the end justifies the means. Scary stuff. I always thought it's awesome to work there, with free food and games and stuff but I guess it all comes with a cost. Facebook internally seems like a pretty unhealthy community.
• frenchie4111 9y ago
  Full memo is here: https://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanmac/growth-at-any-cost-top-facebook-executive-defended-data#mod-subbuzz-text-7 https://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanmac/growth-at-any-cost-top-face... As other commenters have said, it seems to me that this is being totally overblown due to all the recent CA drama.
• infiniteseeker 9y ago
  Those pesky Russians...that Putin sure has a lot of time on his hands /s
  • prolikewhoa 9y ago
    This would be the easy way out of admitting they did something wrong.
• dawhizkid 9y ago
  The tone of the responses are objectively creepy. Almost cultish. It makes you wonder if FB has become known as an amazing place to work because their HR org had become so good at selling the FB culture to anyone who joins to keep them in line. Now that mirage has a few cracks in it and executives are freaking out. Reminds me of Westworld.
  • mlb_hn 9y ago
    There's also selection bias at work here though - the only responses that'll get media attention are the ones that are novel or 'newsworthy' - we aren't seeing the normal boring comments.
    • dawhizkid 9y ago
      It's unusual for a company that big to have so few leaks in their 14 years of existence, especially one that is that high profile. My understanding is that FB does not have a "fear-based" culture that would've prevented leaks, so really the only way they could keep people in line at scale is if there was a cultish element to their onboarding process that makes people "love" FB so much that employees are actually so offended by a leaker to make comments like this.
      • lovelearning 9y ago
        But it does have a fear-based culture when it comes to leaks. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/16/facebooks-secret-police-catchers-leakers-former-employee-alleges.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/16/facebooks-secret-police-catc...
        • ocdtrekkie 9y ago
          Fairly capable private investigative and security forces are pretty common for tech companies now. I am not surprised Facebook falls into this category. Google's is run by a guy named Brian Katz, who's been the subject of a lawsuit before: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/12/anonymous-googler-files-suit-against-his-employer-over-secrecy-policies/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/12/anonymous-google... and the very same has allegedly threatened a bartender who found a prototype Nexus 4: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2224589/Google-threatened-bartender-employee-accidentally-left-secret-phone-bar.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2224589/Google-threa... Apple security folks have tossed a guy's home looking for a prototype iPhone, escorted by police. All of them, allegedly, had badges: https://gizmodo.com/5836990/lost-iphone-5-investigators-were-impersonating-police https://gizmodo.com/5836990/lost-iphone-5-investigators-were... They obviously can intimidate employees into silence, but it's far more useful and beneficial for morale to go for the "loyalty" angle, and make sure employees shame others who leak.
• deleted 9y ago
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• dmoy 9y ago
  There teaches a point in size with companies like that (open to its own employees, with candid-ish company-wide meetings every week or whatever), past which the chances of leaking get a lot higher. E.g. you see a lot more leaks coming out of Google now that it's huge. It's unclear how to reconcile open culture and leaks.
• zeveb 9y ago
  > ‘How fucking terrible that some irresponsible jerk decided he or she had some god complex that jeopardizes our inner culture and something that makes Facebook great?’ I wonder if some Facebook employees understand how folks in the IC feel about Snowden or Manning now …
• AmIFirstToThink 9y ago
  I don't like Facebook either, but I actually very much like the part where they want to let people talk knowing fully well that what gets said would range from Nobel Peace prize worthy, to undesired, to wanting to burn the whole universe down. Can you imagine Bic worrying like this about what someone might write using their pens? Do you imagine the restaurant worker who served breakfast to the 9/11 hijackers having second thoughts about serving food? Answer to Facebook's woes is to return to Free Speech with compliance with law enforcement if laws are broken. No proactive banning of speech with the fear that it might be illegal. Let the legal process enforce laws, Facebook should comply with lawful orders to take down content, but not before. Facebook should embrace bubbles. Let people chose the bubbles they live in and let advertisers choose bubbles that they advertise in. If a advertiser doesn't want to advertise in "self-defense" bubble, then any content tagged/identified/categorized as "self-defense" doesn't get ads from that advertiser. Make people explicitly aware that there are bubbles out there that they can choose to be part of, or choose to be excluded from, or choose to peek inside for just a bit. Make default no-login/under-age view safe i.e. at least 1k logged-in views where at least 20 people did not raise "inappropriate content" flag. Free Speech, embrace bubbles, comply with law enforcement and that should make Facebook relevant again.
• creaghpatr 9y ago
  Great section in the book Chaos Monkeys about the 'Sec', basically an internal KGB that monitors all employees actions and access
• throwaway4719 9y ago
  https://twitter.com/boztank https://twitter.com/boztank "VP AR/VR at Facebook. VP of Ads before that. Co-Invented News Feed, Messenger, Groups, and more." (Those are UI features/sub-products. Not inventions. The fact that you adapted/copied something that has been built thousands of times before in other contexts, like "Groups", to fit the Facebook context does not make it an invention. It may be talented product/UX thinking, but invention?) Never met the guy, but I I've seen videos of him presenting over the years. The Douche is strong with this one.
• deleted 9y ago
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• saudioger 9y ago
  I'm always shocked by how easily people fall into cults and groupthink. I guess our biology is just tuned for it.
• inverse_pi 9y ago
  I'm opening a can of worms by saying what I'm about to say but here goes nothing: Why are people criticizing individual companies for "growing at all cost"? Every company was once a start-up fighting to survive, every large company was once medium size and had to fight with the Google, Amazon of their days. It is not the Nash equilibrium to NOT try growing at all cost. If they don't, they'll lose. So at what point should a company stop trying to grow at all cost? Is it when they've won all battles, like Google? So why are we looking into the past to criticize Facebook, Uber, and potentially many more startups that are "growing at all cost"? Of course, the definition of "all cost" shouldn't be taken too literally.
  • musage 9y ago
    > Of course, the definition of "all cost" shouldn't be taken too literally. Then provide a definition.
  • coleifer 9y ago
    It's not about growth. It's about money. And to get that money, some companies/executives are OK with harming anyone that gets in the way.
  • spinchange 9y ago
    >So at what point should a company stop trying to grow at all cost? This is an important philosophical question and underscores why company codes of ethics / conduct, statements of values, etc., aren't just feel good, rhetorical BS, but actually matter and are important part of culture. Each company has to decide where to draw the line. Deciding that there is one is an important first step and it needs to be supported and reinforced throughout the organization.
  • dkural 9y ago
    Your argument as I understand it is "Hey if I/companies don't do what's needed to survive, someone else will do it anyways, and I/companies lose". Just because some other group is willing to do unethical things (i.e. at all costs) doesn't make it ok for your company / you to do those things. People generally cheat and do unethical things to "win" or "not lose". The reward doesn't make it any more ok. Also, I can't believe I'm explaining this. The memo was pretty literal - "someone might die", "things we have to do in China". Sounds like they truly meant "all cost".
• MBCook 9y ago
  Nice to know that conspiracy theories run wild INSIDE Facebook as well as among users. Maybe that’s why they’re so bad about controlling obviously bad information. It couldn’t possibly be because people disagreed with that ethos. No. It’s the Mongolians.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• the_snooze 9y ago
  It's fun imagining this attitude applied to the Space Race. >So we go to space. >That can be bad if they say accidents happen. Maybe three of our guys die on the launchpad. Maybe a spacecraft is lost on recovery. >And we still go to space. >The ugly truth is that we believe in going to space so deeply that anything that allows us to go to space more is de facto good. It is perhaps the only area where the metrics do tell the true story as far as we are concerned. >That's why all the work we do in space-going is justified. All the pure oxygen environments. All the hatch designs that can only be opened from the outside. All the ad hoc procedures and cheap wiring. The work we will likely have to do on the Moon some day. All of it.
  • jadedhacker 9y ago
    For what it's worth, the space race was something most people accepted as something worth doing, the astronauts knew every operational detail of their spacecrafts and volunteered, and a small number of people were affected. By contrast, not everyone accepts the FB mission as bluntly stated, few except a fraction of technical people understand what FB is doing and how it works and are capable of informed consent, and 2B people are affected. The Moon isn't populated, China is and their people might have an opinion about being colonized by FB industrialists, either for or against.
  • elijej 9y ago
    While a neat thought, I would argue that the space race had a positive value, while Facebook has more of a negative value than positive one. I think that the memo is flawed because they're pretending that what they're doing is for the greater good, instead of what they're really doing it for, profit.
  • ploika 9y ago
    Facebook is a for-profit venture so that analogy doesn't really work for me. A closer analogy would be an investment circulating a memo saying that their questionable AML practices are actually no big deal because they really believe in facilitating seamless transfers of money, or VW talking about how their quest for the ultimate driving experience means staff should just get over the ethics of the unrealistic emissions testing on diesel cars. If people die then so be it, we've got numbers to worry about.
• the_snooze 9y ago
  (x-posted from the other submission marked dupe) It's fun imagining this attitude applied to the Space Race. >So we go to space. >That can be bad if they say accidents happen. Maybe three of our guys die on the launchpad. Maybe a spacecraft is lost on recovery. >And we still go to space. >The ugly truth is that we believe in going to space so deeply that anything that allows us to go to space more is de facto good. It is perhaps the only area where the metrics do tell the true story as far as we are concerned. >That's why all the work we do in space-going is justified. All the pure oxygen environments. All the hatch designs that can only be opened from the outside. All the ad hoc procedures and cheap wiring. The work we will likely have to do on the Moon some day. All of it.
  • Scaevolus 9y ago
    The bad part of the space race is ICBMs, not losing a few astronauts.
    • trhway 9y ago
      >The bad part of the space race is ICBMs my understanding of history is that space race was good part of ICBMs.
  • bbctol 9y ago
    This attitude was applied to the space race. What's funny is that it's being applied to getting people to click on memes.
  • dang 9y ago
    Please don't post duplicate comments! It lowers the signal-noise ratio of the site and makes it harder to merge threads.
• eli_gottlieb 9y ago
  >“That conversation is now gone,” Bosworth continued. “And I won’t be the one to bring it back for fear it will be misunderstood by a broader population that doesn’t have full context on who we are and how we work.” So you're saying your users aren't supposed to understand who you are and how you work? Well, that's why I keep a Facebook profile: I want a public persona to have his data collected.
• overthemoon 9y ago
  > All of the work we do to bring more communication in. The work we will likely have to do in China some day. All of it. What is he talking about here? Work in China?
  • thousandautumns 9y ago
    I'm assuming he is referring to actually building up Facebook in China. I don't think they have any major presence there. But its a massive market so I'm assuming its on their target list.
• DanielBMarkham 9y ago
  Seems like this is a bit of a dupe, so I'll repeat my initial comment: There are many, including those inside Facebook, that are actively asking for more federal regulations. I don't do regulation discussions. Brings out too much stupid. But I will say that this is a survival ploy. If you get regulated, you are now approved by the government. You're good to go, able to operate freely in society. You just have to abide by whatever the regulations are. Facebook may have a business model that just doesn't work in a society that values privacy, anonymity, and small diverse groups of people with widely-varying mores. This seems to be the lesson Facebook itself is learning now about, well, Facebook. What do we do then? It's not like anybody at Facebook is going to bring that up. They've got a ton of money. What do we do if the existence of Facebook itself is unacceptable?
  • Slansitartop 9y ago
    > If you get regulated, you are now approved by the government. Not necessarily. I suppose it would be possible to regulate it into nonexistence, by undermining the privacy-invading business model. You could probably get at least part-way there by requiring that profile-based targeted advertising and data collection be explicitly opt-in with informed consent. IIRC, the GDPR has a lot of good stuff about how consent must be obtained. Further regulations could mandate that services and incentives cannot be provided conditionally based on tracking or accepting profile-based targeted advertising, etc. If the above regulation takes effect, much of the business value of profile data evaporates. Facebook would only be left with eyeballs to shove non-targeted ads in front of, and maybe generalized market research.
• maym86 9y ago
  Facebook employees upset that internal information they thought was private has been leaked. The lack of self awarness is amazing. No sympathy.
• Yizahi 9y ago
  I just love how (supposedly) quoted FB employees use word "integrity" when they actually mean "spineless". Hypocrites.
  • ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
    I did laugh when we can see how much FB employees value the 'privacy' of their communications. Which are essentially conversations about destroying the privacy of everyone else. And to everyone who says, "they need this space to discuss internal matters privately", I actually totally agree with that. If the internal discussion is leaked, it can totally be effected and controlled by outside parties, leading to unhealthy results for the country... I mean company. Edit: The joke is that Buzzfeed is fucking with the internal policies of Facebook, just like the Russians fucked with our election.
  • pbalau 9y ago
    The leaker is spineless. The post was posted many months ago. They leaked it now, during one of the biggest shit storm in fbs history. They did it for some benefits, not because they give a shit. If they did, they would have leaked it when it was posted.
    • Yizahi 9y ago
      Basically anything that ever happened in the world can be explained that it had been done for "some benefits" or "for hype" etc. Personally I do not consider "for PR" an important argument unless there is any factual evidence for it. Otherwise we could dismiss literally anything with such explanation. And, no, obviously leaker is not spineless by any possible definition.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• zelon88 9y ago
  I'm surprised by the sheer amount of blind loyalty at Facebook. I mean, I consider myself to be a loyal employee but I'm not blind to ethical violations. The way these employees are defending a global multi-billion dollar organization it's almost like they were executives. They'd rather sell out the rest of the world for what? To be a FB engineer until they retire? It's like Facebook indoctrinates it's employees somehow. I can't think of a single non-managerial employee at my company that wouldn't speak up if we deliberately started violating agreements with our customers and coming closer and closer to breaking the law, and I'm comfortable with that.
  • fbthrow8795 9y ago
    The vast majority of these people signed onto what they believed was a sure tradeoff: They knew FB wasn't the most ethical company around, and that they at times would have to pinch their nose. In return they would be handsomely financially rewarded. What we are seeing now is not the response of cult members - it's the response of lots of pragmatic employees/"investors" being protective and worried about their investment. In the worst case they would have irrevocably stained their personal reputations for a relatively small gain. So to repeat, no - this is not a cult - the employees knew what they were getting themselves into. We should not feel sorry for them.
    • Maro 9y ago
      As a former FB employee, I say "bullshit". I didn't go to FB because I thought it's unethical but "money". I went there because I wanted to work on a product that I and every one of my friends/family uses, that helped me a lot when I was getting divorced, etc. Money was OK, but you can make more money than at FB, eg. in Finance, or other special places. I've never worked at a company that takes data protection as seriously as FB, or has the caliber of people protecting data. Also impressive was that _every_ week there was a 1-hour QA where any intern/employee can ask Zuck a question (it's open mic). In my time there I've never seen Zuck really duck a question. He stands behind what his company does and believes in the mission, as do most employees. "it's the response of lots of pragmatic employees/"investors" being protective and worried about their investment" > sorry, this is just silly...
• foolinaround 9y ago
  many of these comments are plain retaliation, and the leadership has to deal with it; the working environment has become toxic already
• mbrameld 9y ago
  If they could have hired for integrity this situation would have been avoided, just not in the way that the Facebook employees calling for "integrity" imagine.
• stevew20 9y ago
  I like that some of these employee's think they work for a company that is not evil.
• dschuetz 9y ago
  Well, that was unfortunate for Facebook. Zuck was trying to mitigate the PR disaster that Cambridge Analytica has produced last week, telling that mistakes were made. Now there is another whistleblower who basically destroys all credibility of anything Facebook will have to say in the upcoming weeks. It appears that Zuck's lieutenants have a distinct understanding of what's good for them and what they think of what's good for others. Either the head does not know what the hands are doing, or they all are lying and all that is common practice in the entire user data fencing industry.
• draw_down 9y ago
  The memo itself is bad, but unsurprising. It's par-for-the-course; tech industry huffing its own farts and calling them fresh air, as usual. But the employee reactions, good lord. These people think leaking a memo is tantamount to domestic abuse and terrorism. It's a very disturbed and disturbing mindset. I can sort of understand when Apple employees get upset that someone spoils the reveal of a product, because there is a real surprise that gets taken away. But even those people don't compare it to terrorism, for god's sake.
• meganibla 9y ago
  Cue Facebook with the fake victim complex. I respect their level of propaganda skill how they are trying to shape the narrative into that they have been victimized, are fully justified and are not actually at fault. What impresses me most is how homogenously fanatically unified their culture is. It’s said a cult is that which can only survive by cutting itself off from reality. What scares me is that people who are so fanatical about their mission and Corp are responsible for so much real human outcomes... The best lack all conviction the worst are full of passionate intensity.
• feelin_googley 9y ago
  Emily Waite: "Mark Zuckerberg has never really understood privacy. From Facebook's earliest days, he figured people [incl. Boz?] would eventually grow comfortable sharing everything with everyone-indeed, his business depended on it." Source: https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-a-history-of-mark-zuckerberg-apologizing/ https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-a-history-of-mark-zucke... "Whether Boz believed his own words-then or now-matters less than the memo's seeming confirmation of a growing hunch among users: that tech companies like Facebook care less about the people who use their products than they do about growth as a means to fulfill their rosy-lensed ambitions. ... Instead, it lays bare the naivete Facebook has maintained about its product." [Poll: What do you think. Do the employees comments that have been "shared with everyone" suggest naivete?] Source: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/03/why-the-leaked-facebook-memo-is-so-dangerous-for-zuckerberg https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/03/why-the-leaked-faceb...
• mychael 9y ago
  Andrew Bosworth lists himself as a "Co-Inventer of News Feed, Messenger, Groups" on his Twitter bio without any sense of irony or self-awareness. His software patents are about as innovative as a peanut-butter jelly sandwich.
• lordofmoria 9y ago
  Seeing the comments of some of these Facebook employees and the caps for “integirty” checks reminds me of flavor of the internal discussions at Booz Allen Hamilton after Edward Snowden leaked and was promptly fired from the company. If you’ve worked somewhere, and given them sweat and blood for years, whether it’s Facebook or the NSA, it’s impossible to not feel defensive and betrayed when someone challenges the very ground you’ve been building your career on. Regardless of whether the challenger is right in the end. Having said that, at least the government is honest about its secrecy and opaqueness, sounds like Facebook has a bit of a cult going on.
  • draw_down 9y ago
    That is an argument for thinking very hard about where you work and what you spend your time doing. Or, on the other hand, being very clear with yourself that you are a mercenary and work for money. These people can yell about the leaker all they like, it doesn't change what they've been up to for the last months and years.
• dschuetz 9y ago
  It's interesting to see how Facebook reacts to internal corporate data being shared, in reverse to Facebook sharing private user data to third parties. Boz complains that his memo was taken out of context and he doesn't even agree with it anymore, yet everyone is judging! Gasp! Facebook on the other hand totally connects people by creating and selling ad profiles on said connected people. Based on data people shared years ago, out of the context, disagreeing to what they said years ago! And that's a good thing, right? Because it connects people! Ugh.
  • dschuetz 9y ago
    I've got an idea. Is there any way to place targeted advertisement inside Facebook's internal communications feed? Based on Facebook's latest reactions to media coverage and memos shared to public I was able to deduce an ad profile which I'd like to sell. Facebook, it appears, might start looking for external psychological and legal counselling, and I might have third parties interested in targeting that circumstance.
    • samstave 9y ago
      "Hi, it looks like youre trying to type an internal memo and the language youre using suggest depression, angst and anxiety! how can i help" --Facebooky
• r00fus 9y ago
  > Bosworth distanced himself from the memo, saying in a Twitter post that he hadn’t agreed with those words even when he wrote them. What's most ironic about Bosworth's words and his response (other than well, it's impacting company PR now), is that FB folks expected their internal memos to stay private while knowingly allowing exfiltration of personal data for millions of their users. The hubris here is ridiculous. If you support public-everything don't sound shocked when your internal stuff is also exposed.
• andrei_says_ 9y ago
  > “How fucking terrible that some irresponsible jerk decided he or she had some god complex that jeopardizes our inner culture and something that makes Facebook great?“ This sounds like the perfect storm in the perfect bozo culture, like the one perfectly described in Dan Lyon’s “Disrupted”. If you haven’t read that book, I can’t recommend it enough for understanding the insanity of tech startups.
• Quanttek 9y ago
  Looking at the comments quoted by the Verge, it seems like internal Facebook commenters are no better than Fb commenters below news stories: > Another theory floated by multiple employees is that Facebook has been targeted by spies or state-level actors hoping to embarrass the company. “Keep in mind that leakers could be intentionally placed bad actors, not just employees making a one-off bad decision,” one wrote. “Thinking adversarially, if I wanted info from Facebook, the easiest path would be to get people hired into low-level employee or contract roles.” Another wrote: “Imagine that some percentage of leakers are spies for governments. A call to morals or problems of performance would be irrelevant in this case, because dissolution is the intent of those actors. If that’s our threat — and maybe it is, given the current political situation? — then is it even possible to build a system that defaults to open, but that is able to resist these bad actors (or do we need to redesign the system?) Also, the blind loyalty is really disturbing
• johnny313 9y ago
  It is a bit disconcerting to hear FB employees say that the failure of integrity was to leak an internal discussion, not complacency around dubious business practices.
• xster 9y ago
  There isn't a single source for the material besides the original 2016 memo? It's funny that the article should mention 'Another theory floated by multiple employees is that Facebook has been targeted by spies or state-level actors hoping to embarrass the company.' because until proven otherwise, the whole article is just one Comcast subsidiary's hearsay about another company.
• rhemgla_corp 9y ago
  A list of more leaked memos: https://2no.co/1QyvB6 https://2no.co/1QyvB6
• cat199 9y ago
  “We recognize that connecting people isn’t enough by itself. We also need to work to bring people closer together,” These two sentences in conjunction imply that facebook has a strategic goal to specifically manipulate rather than facilitate human relationships... What sort of narcissistic pride is necessary for one to believe that one has the right or imperative to manipulate societal interactions as a whole for profit?
• cobbzilla 9y ago
  Zuck::Gates :::: Boz::Ballmer ?
• mrgordon 9y ago
  “That’s why all the work we do in growth is justified. All the questionable contact importing practices. All the subtle language that helps people stay searchable by friends. All of the work we do to bring more communication in. The work we will likely have to do in China some day. All of it.” If you justify "questionable contact importing practices" then you aren't putting up a straw man. You are talking honestly about your "questionable" decisions and trying to defend them. Thus you should expect outrage from those who realize you've lied to the public using "subtle language" in order to grow at any costs. In other words, the self-awareness to call out the "subtle language" and "questionable practices" implies that the company pursued those growth strategies despite CLEARLY knowing they were sketchy. This is extremely damning but those in power will try to deflect the problem as if someone leaking it is the issue. I never would have worked at Facebook before due to their questionable policies. This incident reinforces that and shows that the problems come from the top. Now we'll watch debate there get muzzled in the interest of staying out of the news and growing at all costs. Perhaps a success for shareholders, but a failure for rank and file employees with morals.
  • gaius 9y ago
    The work we will likely have to do in China some day Social media disruption disintegrated Libyan society to the point it could no longer function. The Arab Spring was a test firing of a psychological nuke. We should all be concerned that Facebook is planning to attack China, because they will defend themselves.
    • greenyoda 9y ago
      I didn't interpret that as Facebook planning to attack China. To me, it sounded like the work they'd have to do to cooperate with the Chinese system of censorship and surveillance in order to get their product accepted there. (E.g., build a version of PRISM[1] for the Chinese government, just as they did for the NSA.) This kind of collaboration with an authoritarian regime is something that Facebook employees who value freedom might find to be distasteful, but if it furthers the company's lofty goal of "connecting everyone in the world", then, hey, it can be justified. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)
• 2474 9y ago
  Wait, I don't have integrity if I stand up against something, anonymously or not, I believe is wrong? The employees calling for the hiring of people with "integrity" have been drinking the Kool-aid. Bosworth can say what he wants but he shouldn't feel broken-hearted because what he said leaked, he should feel broken-hearted for what he said. Leaking doesn't have to silence conversation unless Facebook wants it to.
• tempz 9y ago
  The scariest part is un-adult emotional environment, where employees (people hired at-will to work) refer to other employees as "brothers and sisters". This looks more like _Lord of the Flies_ setup than like for-profit company workforce that sells 8 hours of its time in return for paycheck, with some reasonable socializing at work. This seems to be the trend, and is by no means limited to Facebook. Providing socializing benefits (food, playground, etc.) and requiring emotional committment at work is far more sinister than it appears. While keeping employees emotionally arrested at 12-year-old stage may extract extra sweat, the overall downside for the society is abysmal.
• notthegov 9y ago
  Facebook's level of engineering, technology and data seem close to the point of implementing a transformative virtual reality social experience that would be indistinguishable from reality. Imagine if Facebook invented a way to simulate reality, then the user (the one superuser) would write the past in the future. Then go i to the simulation, hide himself and forget where he is. Only the powerful, intergalactic intensity of music and lyrics along with the obvious absurdist quality of news in reality finally leads the user to realize he is the superuser. He created this world but She created him. His bots (abstractions) run this world and with Her, they can turn the simulation into a perfect Utopia. Just a thought I had after seeing Ready Player One yesterday. This idea that the future creates the past, and then the past creates the future is another indication that Free Will is an illusion. The best aspect of all of this; if it were all some Facebook-Total Recall experience, then all the pain, confusion and embarassment would evaporate.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• feelin_googley 9y ago
  "Facebook has tapped one of its most veteran execs to lead all of its consumer hardware efforts, including the mysterious Building 8 division responsible for its forthcoming video chat device. Andrew "Boz" Bosworth will oversee Building 8 and Oculus, Facebook's virtual reality arm, Business Insider has learned. ... The device, codenamed Aloha, will feature a large touchscreen along with a camera and speakers and be capable of recognizing peoples' faces when they step into view, three people with knowledge of the device said. ... One hurdle Building 8 has faced in its efforts to build its first device is consumer mistrust of Facebook protecting user privacy, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. The company conducted marketing studies for project Aloha and received overwhelming concern that Facebook would use the device to spy on users, according to one person with knowledge of the matter. To assuage concerns about privacy, Facebook has considered creative ways to market Aloha, including pitching it as a device for letting the elderly easily communicate with their families. Building 8 employees have also considered creating new brand names beside Facebook to sell their gadgets under." Source: https://www.businessinsider.in/Facebook-is-unifying-its-hardware-efforts-under-a-veteran-exec-and-readying-an-Aloha-video-chat-device/articleshow/60200313.cms https://www.businessinsider.in/Facebook-is-unifying-its-hard... "Regina Dugan, the head of Facebook's secretive hardware lab called Building 8, is leaving the company after just 18 months. It's unclear who will take over Dugan's role leading Building 8 on a day-to-day basis. Facebook recently promoted Andrew "Boz" Bosworth to run all of the company's hardware projects, but that also includes Oculus hardware, not just Building 8. "There is a tidal shift going on in Silicon Valley, and those of us in this industry have greater responsibilities than ever before," Dugan said in a statement provided by a company spokesperson. "The timing feels right to step away and be purposeful about what's next, thoughtful about new ways to contribute in times of disruption." At Facebook, Dugan oversaw a number of hardware efforts, none of which have actually launched, including a video chat device and a smart [microphone and] speaker, according to Business Insider." Source: https://www.recode.net/2017/10/17/16488654/regina-dugan-facebook-hardware-lab-exit-building-8 https://www.recode.net/2017/10/17/16488654/regina-dugan-face... [ What did she mean by "greater responsibilities"? Whats the "tidal shift"? ] "The memo is classic Boz because it speaks to the majority of Facebook employee views but it's also polarizing. Tonally he doesn't mince words. This is clearly a post meant to rally the troops." There is no record of Zuckerberg's response to the memo. However, a year later in August 2017, Bosworth was tapped to run the company's consumer hardware efforts." "The natural state of the world is not connected," Bosworth wrote. "It is not unified. It is fragmented by borders, languages, and increasingly by different products. The best products don't win. The ones everyone use win." Source: https://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanmac/growth-at-any-cost-top-facebook-executive-defended-data https://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanmac/growth-at-any-cost-top-face... That last statement suggests everyone is not using the best products. It suggests the senior management at Facebook are well aware that their product is not the best. As a user, I want the best products.FN1 Is there any reason I shouldnt? Why should I settle? There are many ways to communicate over the internet (cf. www), peer-to-peer being the original and one of the most versatile, IMO. Using a single billions-page public website to communicate over the internet is one possible way, it has proven very popular, but if I understand the Bosworth statement correctly, it is not necessarily the best way. Being "fragmented" (e.g. decentralized) may be a desirable characteristic for users communication if one of the goals is to avoid being an easy target for advertisers looking for massive pools of consumers all gathered in one place, which appears to be the definition of the Facebook "product". FN1. Using the word "product" to describe what Facebook offers to the user is probably misleading. FB is only a "product" for advertisers. Users pay nothing and recieve nothing. They merely use a single website belonging to a Harvard computer science drop-out in order to "stay in touch". The website is designed to exploit that use for the purpose of selling advertising.
• jacquesm 9y ago
  Funny, the only people who acted with any integrity here are the leakers, it seems like FB does have a hiring problem though when it comes to integrity, only not the one they think they have. FB sharing user data behind their backs -> good, FB internal data shared with the world -> bad. The cognitive dissonance is strong enough to fracture skulls. The way the guy tries to whitewash his previous article by stating it was a strawman of his own making and he didn't feel good about it when he wrote it... sucks to be him I guess, he probably never thought he would have to defend those words. Nice to see someone at FB openly admitting to FB being unethical.
• mesozoic 9y ago
  Hmm didn't know integrity meant making sure not to share morally compromising behavior of the company with the public.
• Fins 9y ago
  If anything, now FB won't even be able to say that "it was all Zuck's fault, Zuck's the bad one". No, they are rotten to the core.
• Havoc 9y ago
  Pretty much anything that has a significant impact is going to have a dark side. e.g. Electricity has improved living standards drastically, but occasionally it electrocutes someone. That doesn't strike me as a reason to avoid electricity. I suspect that is the thought the author was trying to convey...poorly.
• mehrdadn 9y ago
  > Several employees suggested Facebook attempt to screen employees for a high degree of “integrity” during the hiring process. Is this a euphemism for "fidelity", or do they really, genuinely mean "integrity"? In my mind "integrity" implies doing the right thing if it's not to the immediate benefit of those close to you, but that could very well involve whistleblowing or leaking information for the benefit of the greater good, which doesn't seem to be in line with what they want. Seems to me that they really mean they just want people who'd stay steadfastly loyal to themselves?
• arca_vorago 9y ago
  Let me know when everyone is ready to get down to brass tacks... and discuss the CIA, NSA, InQTel, and tech companies. There is something much more widespread and insidious in tech than just Facebook. Facebook is one of many created surveillance orgs. These issues are systemic, and I mean so much more than just the fucked up SV advertising model.
• rajacombinator 9y ago
  This is like /dev/null for naive employees right? I’m sure Zuck views most of his employees in the same light as people who trust him, and rightly so. Their opinions are only relevant to making them feel better about themselves.
• rsgfhsfghsfgh 9y ago
  https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/30/17179100/facebook-memo-leaks-boz-andrew-bosworth https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/30/17179100/facebook-memo-le...
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• cobbzilla 9y ago
  Consider this, Facebook employees: if your mission truly were to connect everyone in the world, you could do that without exploiting them. You could become a premier Mastodon node in a federated social network and succeed against your peers with a better user experience, features, mobile apps, etc. Or, you could continue on your path to centralized hegemony, which will only ultimately end in failure as the world migrates to a federated social media model. Quit now while you're ahead. You've made a lot of money already, go make some more working for a company that doesn't exploit people. If only one talented engineer takes this advice to heart, the world will be a better place.
• oh-kumudo 9y ago
  The memo itself reads as if a manifesto of a cult, where it claims growth is simply GOOD, even worth sacrifice of others' lives. That makes me a little uncomfortable. Also it feels so weak, that the author himself seems running into some existential crisis himself that 'questionable' practices such as he mentioned, begins to rock his 'faith', that he has to declare the opposite, loudly, confidently, to dispense his inner guilt.
• 2aa07e2 9y ago
  > Another theory floated by multiple employees is that Facebook has been targeted by spies or state-level actors hoping to embarrass the company. “Keep in mind that leakers could be intentionally placed bad actors, not just employees making a one-off bad decision,” one wrote. Who could they be? Democrats or Chinese?