Internal Facebook posts of employees discussing leaked memo

For a view on what's different an excerpt from a Guardian piece is below.

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“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-v...

Facebook surrendered it's right to discuss such things privately when it's willfully kept lax policies on sharing users data. Stuff like this should leak earlier so we can talk about it before, rather than after, awful things happen.

I think you could write about the ideas contained in Boz's memo in such a way that if the memo leaked you still wouldn't look like huge bleeps.

It's not the conversations that are getting them into trouble. If it were just this memo, then nobody would care.

Their action are getting them into trouble. Leaking memos like this merely offers a window into their souls.

It's an "emperor's new clothes" situation where we all get to play the role of the child.

It showed that FB says one thing in public and then does the opposite in private.

It's great they feel they created a microcosm of openness within the company, but that doesn't seem to have made it act any more morally when it comes to protecting user privacy.

I read his memo titled "The Ugly." There was nothing in there that was critical of "the company." The only criticality I read was this individual being critical of people who might be prone to self-reflection. Judging from the memo and other employees characterizations of him "Boz" just sounds like a total asshole.

It applies to pretty much any tech company that claims to love debate and dissent internally.

“We connect people. Period. 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”

This is not dissent, this is not 'rocking the boat', this is not being critical of the company. He's taking their mission to the extreme worst case scenario and saying that even then the mission is justified. It's the polar opposite of the things you assert it is.

FB is covering by saying no one agreed with it and it was only there to provoke discussion. Why delete the post and its discussion then? It's obvious the discussion on the post wasn't critical enough to actually provide cover for these excuses so they burnt the post and are now lying about it.

Except that, Bosworth's shabby recants aside, in the original post the driving mission was not questioned but reinforced to an extreme, cult-like degree by a high ranking Facebook official. He didn't minced words and sought no compromise: growth at any cost, using unethical methods and to the point of endangering people, if that is what it takes. Growth is a good by definition, regardless what your antiquated, pre-Facebook morals tell you.

This a wide extension of the field where debate is possible and a strong reinforcement for unethical behaviour, "Facebook and Boz have your back and anyone questioning growth is an enemy". What was previously unspeakable, is now under debate, we are debating the degree of acceptable unethical behavior and Boz's position seems to be "to any degree". This was merely 20 months ago, not in the distant past when Facebook was founded.

It's specious to call this an environment of open debate, it's a bold move to the organizational culture of a cult or criminal gang. It's not surprising at all then that the current debate centers on ways to root out the traitors and select employees for "integrity" (unflinching loyalty).

> 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.

> I know a lot of people don’t want to hear this. Most of us have the luxury of working in the warm glow of building products consumers love. But make no mistake, growth tactics are how we got here. If you joined the company because it is doing great work, that’s why we get to do that great work.

I understand what you and others are trying to say. That he somehow disagreed with his own words, and wrote it to start an internal debate.

But is the reader supposed to know that from some kind of context we can't see? From the words themselves, it seems pretty clear he fully supports the continuation of, in his own words, "questionable" practices.

Unless you were there since 2005, Boz was a higher up with more seniority, so the original memo was more of a put up or shut up piece than an RFC.

It likely depends on where you are in the company. I haven't worked at FB but have a few friends who have in the past. One of them told me something pretty similar to what you experienced, the other had the exact opposite.

So I'm honestly not sure what to believe about their culture. It seems, once a company gets big enough, that culture becomes multiple sub cultures and I'm not sure there is a single culture that drives the company anymore.

This just reveals how big the power imbalance is between employees and executives that we’d have to make such decisions.

The post in full doesn't read at all like it was to stimulate discussion. It reads more like it was to silence dissent.

If you really wanted to stimulate discussion and gather employee views on this stuff, you'd send a survey round. But the relationship is still asymmetrical between boss and employee.

All you're doing when posting something like this semi-publicly is creating an environment where more quiet conscientious views get shouted down by the loudest voices.

I would never be tempted to suspend disbelief that this one time my opinion, effort, goodwill actually mattered.

I've fallen for the "trust us" scam too many times. Embarrassing. Ever more, the only thing I trust is mutual distrust.

That's a false dichotomy. I'd like to work for an employer that would not mind me discussing my work related stuff outside without immediately classifying that as a leak, and I'd like my employer to trust my judgment in knowing what is and what is not appropriate in such discussions.

I think the reality with FB is that the current idealized system is not necessarily the best, and likewise, the occurrence of leaks is not necessarily a sign of impending doom. Sometimes leaks are a necessary symptom for when an organization has gone off the rails and has failed to self-correct. I don’t think any organization enjoys or wants leaks — just as no human enjoys sneezing or diarrhea — but sometimes the temporary discomfort is necessary for long-term health.

I like the idea of employees having open discussions about company policy and direction, but I would never would have believed such a thing could exist at enormous companies like Facebook and Google. Though, given headlines recently, I'm not sure it will survive much longer.

Personally, I’d rather be in the dark about policy than be schnookered into thinking that I have some meaningful input.

It's ironic to see employees complaining about what is essentially a lack of privacy, when the company they work for goes out of its way to convince everybody that privacy is a thing of the past, and in so many words, so does the very Bosworth post they would protect and keep private. Eat your own dog food.

And then one of them says that whoever leaked the post (the whistleblower, is how I would refer to them) lacks integrity. Integrity? You work for Facebook. Has it never occurred to you that maybe you're the baddies?

I'm a contractor, in the same team of FTE devs for a year, it's going really well, but I was a little hurt when I realised they were reading CVs to fill a vacancy in the team without putting me in the loop.

Edit: I understand why they are doing it, I mean I'm from a big consulting company (Alten), but still it stung a little, especially since I'm on pretty good term with the rest of the team.

Employers which still use trust at scale are ignoring their risk analysts. The risk of a secret leaking is proportional to the number of people who know the secret. You can reduce the risk with Stasi-style surveillance, or legal enforcement (e.g. legally classified state secrets), but few people wish to work under those conditions.

It's a false dichotomy because people would rather work for an employer that trusts them with the secrets they need to get their job done, and doesn't trust them with the secrets they don't need, a.k.a. the principle of least access. Openness in organizations is important insofar as people can attain access to information they need when they need it, but not unlimited access to everything, which ultimately reduces organizational trust when leaks inevitably occur.

It seems apt that internal debates and posts would leak to the outside world.

The language was kind of funny to me even. Hunting down the leakers to make Facebook great again... the company sounds like the business version of the white house administration. If it's this difficult and requires this much secrecy to convince yourself that what you're doing isn't evil then maybe something is very wrong on a foundational level.

I'm struggling to see why anybody thinks this is a reasonable defence.

There is no indication he didn't believe it. The company's behaviour is consistent with it. He only said "I didn't mean it, it was to stimulate debate", and the classic "You're missing context" (which I am not able to show, of course) after drawing negative PR.

It seems very generous to me to give his recent tweet much credibility at all.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult#Metaphorical_uses_o...

Many jobs considered "good" require a person to forget about ethics.

Tobacco, oil, pharma, agro, car, ads industries. Now we can also add "social web" to this list.

A person willing to suspend morals in exchange of money is the one you should not trust. Especially if they cannot be held accountable for their actions.

Because hell knows what ELSE they are ready to do.

And they will fight to defend their source of income = "loyalty" = "protecting questionable practices" = "indulging in mafia-like behaviors".

This argument is illogical, because Facebook forces everyone to sign its ToS to use its services, while nobody forces a Facebook employee to leak internal stuff. Said another way, whether or not I wish to have control over my FB data, FB coerces me to agree that it can do whatever it wants with my data. Its not exactly opt-in, is it? Its far worse, of course, if you consider shadow profiles, because it is even coercing people who didn't even explicitly sign up to the ToS. Unless the leak happened via some kind of coercion (which doesn't seem to be the case), your comment is incorrect.

>> 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.

What? You mean you care about something, but you just won't do something about it, nor openly tell anyone why you wouldn't do something about it, or even talk about it before the issue blows up? Yep, totally convincing.

>> Maybe that would lead to more collaboration on solutions,

Why do people need to "collaborate" on solutions? What do they get from it? Is Facebook going to pay people a share of the profits? If Facebook is a corporate entity which serves its self-interest against people's self-interest (which they have clearly been doing for a long time), what kind of idiot would suggest the people whose self-interest has been affected should now "come to the table" so "we can all work something out"?

>> which is necessary because there are actually some tricky tradeoffs here.

The only tricky tradeoff here is: should Mark Zuckerberg be the only one who should go to jail, or should the entire company be rounded up? It is quite tricky, I do agree.

>> But that doesn't give the same dopamine hit as cutting down the tall poppies, right?

I don't know about tall poppies, but "culling" the "weeds" is the only way to have a healthy garden.

There's a power asymmetry here that makes the individual user vulnerable, and that power asymmetry should be countered by demanding transparency.

There's an obvious parallel here between individual citizens and government apparatus.

Those that control infrastructure and institutions shouldn't be enabled to abuse that power. And if they do they shouldn't be surprised when the affected protest!

My point is that Facebook's ethos, that a post-privacy era can exist and be okay, is betrayed by how they clamor when it's their own privacy. It makes it feel like it's a one-directional relationship.

Perhaps you're suggesting facebook's ethos is actually that a privacy middle-ground can exist, where people can choose what gets shown where and to whom. I can't disprove that that's their ideal, but in light of their data-sharing I have no reason to believe it.

Aside from ideals, we can point out the consequences of Facebook in practice. Facebook is a written medium that preserves everything (even something from 2 years ago) and thus has constructed a system that forces its users to hyper-curate their entire public persona or suffer social consequences, and from a practical perspective their own VP failed to curate sufficiently. So regardless of ideals, if the system punishes discussion then I see that as a problem, as well as an irony when it happens to their own VP.

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...

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...

It helps the general public by giving insight about how crazy is the people that builds and moderate the platform used to communicate by millions of people.

Do you think Snowden's leaks were intended to help the NSA?

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.

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)

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.

I assume you're ok with people being mad about leaked products they've been working hard on for years having their big debut ruined?

So why would employees be mad about the leaking of internal meetings or discussions? Because in the majority of the cases, these leaks don't hurt company management, they hurt employees.

Several times in the past, Googlers have had their physical or mental safety threatened by such leaks. What you see as a company discussion leaked, turns out to be a real life Doxx-ing of employees. Would Damore have been fired if someone hadn't leaked his memo externally? Probably not, he'd be quietly transferred by HR and maybe managed out, but able to preserve his career elsewhere in the valley. The response to his firing was that the internal company meeting questions got leaked and the real names of several female and transgender employees got forwarded to alt-right sites, which proceeded to harass them, send death threats, etc.

And one year, an "innocent" leak of Google's yearly company Christmas present, a brown envelope with cash in it, put the physical safety of Googlers at risk, because Google Shuttle bus stops are well known and Googlers are easily identified in public, and that day, everyone knew Googlers would be carrying hundreds of dollars of cash in brown envelopes.

These leaks often harm employees, not management.

McDonalds, and more general retail businesses, Target, Walgreens, ..., call centres, ... those are the ones both installing massive surveillance and actually getting it analyzed. Or at least, enough to pay me loads of money to make it possible, and I've had some conversations, they do this routinely. And frankly, I'm pretty sure that since this is directed by low-level managers (you can't do it otherwise, not at that scale, all tracking is done by the store manager) there will be tons and tons of abuse of these systems. I mean for trivial reasons, like stealing, attempting to make a false accusation of stealing stick, stalking girls (or even men), that sort of thing.

From what I can tell, at FB the entrances and exits, some presumably high value locations inside and to a lesser extent the parking lot, those are the places under surveillance. I'm pretty sure that at most places in the FB buildings nobody can see you on any security monitor (it's one of those open plan offices, not much privacy, easy to get everything under surveillance, but they're not doing it. I've been to several call centres where surveillance was utterly pervasive in the same sort of environment. Although the environment was much, much better at FB. Big open office plan, but the air was perfect, for lack of a better word. It wasn't cramped at all, it wasn't like those call centres at all, no wall smelled, not like smoke, not like oil, nothing like that). And of course you hear stories, like "sneaking" into the office on sunday for a board game because it's an easy place and central for everyone to get together is pretty normal.

Of course I realize that this is "fake" like it is fake at any company. Unless you're the CEO AND own a majority of the shares, the company is not a social club, it is not there to have your back. But they have that vibe going there, and they wouldn't have that vibe if they broke it for trivial reasons.

> legal threats and restricted stock units to prevent and detect intellectual property theft

Protecting yourself against insider threats by giving employees means for a good life ! How UNAMERICAN !

I'm pretty sure at your local supermarket you'd find those same threats, except they're totally pervasive. Every employee will have been threatened, and I assure you, ...

... not with restricted stock units or any kind of reward.

I’m not saying they’re like a phone company, I’m saying this would be the equivalent of a phone company saying what I said.

There’s a very clear difference.

I’m also not saying Facebook is a social good here, but those wrongs, valid or not, are tangential to the memo.

If you were around at the turn of the 20th century, you might think very differently. Gossip lines, heck, when lines were shared you could ease drop on your neighbors conversations. The telephone company must have had some idea of what they were enabling in society at the time.

He could have taken strong steps to undo this memo, if he really regretted it and didn't agree with what it says.

To me it looks like the "guilty conscience" of someone simply trying to evade consequences.

And I guess I’ll agree to disagree. All I read was a tacky attempt at acknowledging bad people are allowed to use good things. I think you’re painting your own narrative on to a cliche startup growth memo ex post facto in a world where they’ve finished growing

You've broken several of the site guidelines with this. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and abide by them when commenting here.

>That’s why all the work we do in growth

I'm not reading that as "anything we do for growth is justified". It's "everything we do in growth", as in all the tactics we currently use in our departments focused on growth, are justified.

This is like "everything we do in sales is kosher". It's admitting you do some abrasive things, but it's stuff that's justified.

Does it sound gross? Yes. Is it true for most companies? Yes. These are uncomfortable truths, companies make sites imperfect to optimize for ad revenue, do extensive A/B testing to see how they can influence behavior, go as far as sending you 20 email drip campaigns or bombard you with notifications to wear you down into using their products, these are all growth tactics that get used by not-evil companies.

To me, the dumbest part of this is that someone would write this all down, and be proud of it. So proud they'd make it a memo and send it company-wide.

This is the silent shame of the tech world. We're forced to modify our most harmless ideas to make a successful product in the real world where even having the best product ever won't guarantee success without tons of marketing using ad campaigns driven by ill-gotten analytics data.

That's what "Most of us have the luxury of working in the warm glow of building products consumers love. But make no mistake, growth tactics are how we got here." is saying.

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.

Evidence please?

There was one test conducted with 600-700k users (out of 2 billion plus). This is negligible and honestly not statistically significant enough.

Plenty of reasonable concerns around political advertising, bad actors, transparancy into who is funding / buying ads are largely things to be concerned about.

However, errant ranting as above is not exactly helpful to this debate.

Also calling $FB not successful is laughable? On what grounds can you actually say this?

There is almost no evidence that the ad product actually influenced america (it was more likely TV). If you need to be educated about advertising i'm happpy to help you here but as someone who does this for a living I can categorically tell you this - the ads did not sway the election based on the pseudo-science bullshit from Wylie, Nix and anyone else in CA.

my understanding of history is that space race was good part of ICBMs.

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

Disclaimer: I worked at FB.

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.

Why couldn't a discussion about the future (features? :)) of Facebook could not be open if it's such a big and far reaching platform? What's to hide?

Media would have hard time feeding on it, compared to the current situation where it is all interesting and whatever because some "secret" "leaked" and therefore it is "newsworthy".