Facebook staff slam leakers and fear ‘spies’
Facebook employees are calling for a crackdown on suspected leakers and questioning whether ‘‘spies’’ have infiltrated the corporation, according to leaked internal posts that suggest the social media giant’s workforce is becoming defensive in the face of critical public scrutiny.
The posts were a response to the leak of a memo by a senior Facebook executive, Andrew ‘‘Boz’’ Bosworth, who defended the social network’s negative effects on society.
While Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has publicly sought to distance himself from the controversial memo, many of his staff, it appears, have focused their ire on the leaker, lashing out at disloyalty within the company.
The extraordinary messages, obtained by tech website The Verge, provide a rare window into Facebook’s internal culture: while there was dissent from employees, many appeared focused on flushing out whistleblowers.
‘‘Leakers, please resign instead of sabotaging the company,’’ one wrote in response to a note Bosworth sent this week addressing the controversy.
‘‘How f ..... g terrible that some irresponsible jerk decided he or she had some god complex that jeopardises our inner culture and something that makes Facebook great?’’ another said.
[I] 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. Facebook employee
Facebook has come under unprecedented scrutiny in recent months, which intensified in the wake of reporting in British newspapers The Observer and The Guardian revealing that the personal information of 50 million users was used by electioneering firm Cambridge Analytica. The crisis has wiped billions off Facebook’s stock, and Zuckerberg is expected to be grilled by the United States Congress in coming weeks.
BuzzFeed this week published the 2016 memo by Bosworth, in which he acknowledged that Facebook’s expansion could lead to deaths and help terrorists plan attacks, but argued that these were reasonable consequences of the company’s broader ‘‘growth tactics’’ and mission to ‘‘connect’’ people. He wrote that ‘‘anything that allows us to connect more people more often is *de facto* good’’.
Bosworth has distanced himself from the memo, claiming it was intended to be provocative, adding: ‘‘I didn’t agree with it even when I wrote it.’’
However, The Verge found Facebook employees directing their frustration at the leaker, urging Facebook to do more to screen employees for ‘‘integrity’’ during hiring.
One wrote: ‘‘Although we all subconsciously look for signal on integrity in interviews, should we consider whether this needs to be formalised in the interview process?’’
Another said: ‘‘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.’’
Another lamented that leakers were inevitable, writing: ‘‘We have our representative share of sick people, drug addicts, wife beaters, and suicide bombers. Some of this cannot be mitigated by training. To me, this makes it just a matter of time.’’
Some employees went so far as to speculate that people could be joining Facebook for the purpose of monitoring and leaking.
‘‘Keep in mind that leakers could be intentionally placed bad actors, not just employees making a oneoff bad decision. Thinking adversarially, if I wanted info from Facebook, the easiest path would be to get people hired into lowlevel employee or contract roles,’’ one wrote.
Another added: ‘‘Imagine that some %age 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.’’
Facebook did not respond request for comment.
In a memo to staff this week addressing the scandal, also obtained by The Verge, Bosworth also focused on the leak of his memo, complaining that the release of the document had forced him to delete the original post.
‘‘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,’’ he wrote.
Facebook and other big tech companies are known for aggressively monitoring their own employees and swiftly punishing people who get caught leaking.
A recent Guardian investigation uncovered details of Facebook’s so-called ‘‘rat-catching’’ team, which conducts intense surveillance on workers. to a