She risked everything to expose Facebook. Now she’s telling her story | Hacker News Reader

She risked everything to expose Facebook. Now she’s telling her story

technologyreview.com

43 pointssss1116 comments

"When she received Facebook’s offer, she was upfront with her recruiter: she didn’t think the company was making the world better, but she would join to help fix it."

I don't get people who think like this. They're hiring you to be a "low level data scientist" not CEO. How would you possibly change a giant company?

must be some kind of overconfidence bias. Though arguably it probably appears easier to change facebook than philipp morris or exxon mobile (at least if you don't frequent hacker news and read all about how zuckerberg ticks), in that the idea of facebook (connect people) is basically a good one so why shouldn't the corporate version of it work?

The various teams in Facebook recruit under the surmise of helping protect people. Be it marketplace (payments), spam/phish/malware, inauthentic content, etc. For many, this is a strong draw.

Unfortunately, Facebook leadership has repeatedly shown that investing in this area is not a priority unless it hits their bottom line. I applaud Sophie for speaking out, I just wish it would make a bigger difference. In the end, I don't think Facebook will change their behavior will unless forced.

The only people who ever changed the world are the ones who thought they could.

> On her last day, hours after she posted her memo internally, Facebook deleted it (though they later restored an edited version after widespread employee anger). A few hours later, an HR person called her, asking her to also remove a password-protected copy she had posted on her personal website. She tried to bargain: she would do so if they restored the internal version. The next day, instead, she received a notice from her hosting server that it had taken down her entire website after a complaint from Facebook. A few days after that, it took down her domain as well.

Emphasis mine. This is just incredible. There's no reason hosting providers and domain registrars should have that power. They should be regulated as common carriers.

The scariest part of this whole story is how Facebook was able to simply take down her domain and hosting service without any real adjudication whatsoever

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