FACEBOOK'S EMPLOYEES RECKON WITH THE SOCIAL NETWORK THEY'VE BUILT
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While external criticisms of Facebook, which has roughly 3 billion users across its various social platforms, have persisted since the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, they’ve rarely sparked wide-scale dissent inside the social media giant. As it weathered one scandal after another — Russian election interference, Cambridge Analytica, Rohingya genocide in Myanmar — over the past three and a half years, Facebook’s stock price rose and it continued to recruit and retain top talent. In spite of the occasional internal dustup, employees generally felt the company was doing more good than harm. At the very least, they avoided publicly airing their grievances.
“This time, our response feels different,” wrote Facebook engineer Dan Abramov in a June 26 post on Workplace, the company’s internal communications platform. “I’ve taken some [paid time off] to refocus, but I can’t shake the feeling that the company leadership has betrayed the trust my colleagues and I have placed in them.”
Messages like those from Wang and Abramov illustrate how Facebook’s handling of the president’s often divisive posts has caused a sea change in its ranks and led to a crisis of confidence in leadership, according to interviews with current and former employees and dozens of documents obtained by BuzzFeed News. The documents — which include company discussion threads, employee survey results, and recordings of Zuckerberg — reveal that the company was slow to take down ads with white nationalist and Nazi content reported by its own employees. They demonstrate how the company’s public declarations about supporting racial justice causes are at odds with policies forbidding Facebookers from using company resources to support political matters. They show Zuckerberg being publicly accused of misleading his employees. Above all, they portray a fracturing company culture.
Frustrated and angry, employees are now challenging Zuckerberg and leadership at companywide meetings, staging virtual walkouts, and questioning if their work is making the world a better place. The turmoil has reached a point where Facebook's CEO recently threatened to fire employees who “bully” their colleagues.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/facebook-employee-leaks-show-they-feel-betrayed
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