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Facebook Employees In An Uproar Over Executive's Leaked Memo (nytimes.com)
According to The New York Times, "Facebook employees were in an uproar on Friday over a leaked 2016 memo from a top executive defending the social network's growth at any cost -- even if it caused deaths from a terrorist attack that was organized on the platform." From the report: In the memo, Andrew Bosworth, a Facebook vice president, wrote, "Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools. And still we connect people. 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." Mr. Bosworth and Facebook's chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, have since disavowed the memo, which was published on Thursday by BuzzFeed News.
But the fallout at the Silicon Valley company has been wide. According to two Facebook employees, workers have been calling on internal message boards for a hunt to find those who leak to the media (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source). Some have questioned whether Facebook has been transparent enough with its users and with journalists, said the employees, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation. Many are also concerned over what might leak next and are deleting old comments or messages that might come across as controversial or newsworthy, they said. In the aftermath, some Facebook executives have taken to Twitter for a public charm offensive, sending pithy phrases and emoticons to reporters who cover the company. Adam Mosseri, Facebook's head of news, in recent days wrote unprompted to a BuzzFeed editor and to its chief executive reminiscing and telling a story about his mother. He also wrote to a reporter from the Verge tech site about the songs played at his wedding reception.
But the fallout at the Silicon Valley company has been wide. According to two Facebook employees, workers have been calling on internal message boards for a hunt to find those who leak to the media (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source). Some have questioned whether Facebook has been transparent enough with its users and with journalists, said the employees, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation. Many are also concerned over what might leak next and are deleting old comments or messages that might come across as controversial or newsworthy, they said. In the aftermath, some Facebook executives have taken to Twitter for a public charm offensive, sending pithy phrases and emoticons to reporters who cover the company. Adam Mosseri, Facebook's head of news, in recent days wrote unprompted to a BuzzFeed editor and to its chief executive reminiscing and telling a story about his mother. He also wrote to a reporter from the Verge tech site about the songs played at his wedding reception.
That was my impression too. Read the whole memo to get the context of what he's saying. If you still don't get it, substitute a few words:
"Maybe someone eats a sandwich who's a terrorist who wants to attack and kill people. And still we feed people. The ugly truth is that we believe in feeding people so deeply that anything that allows us to feed more people more often is *de facto* good."
He then goes on to say that most of what they do is good (well, for some value of good), and the good outweighs the bad.
That single out-of-context quote does make for great clickbait, I must admit. Having said that, if I wanted that kind of crap I'd read the Sun, their page 3 is more interesting than Slashdot's.
I hate to play devils advocate for someone who may actually be a devil, but in my experience most corporate executives believe - at least on some level - the bullshit they preach.
They genuinely think that they're doing something worthwhile, and that if a few bad things happen (like people dying), then that's OK because it's for the greater good. "If we can get everyone connected and talking to one another, then surely that must be a good thing; if people across borders are friends through Facebook, that must make wars less likely, saving millions of lives, so a few suicides and terrorist atrocities here and there are sad, but a price worth paying. The fact that we have to sell user data to skeezy people to pay the bills is just an unfortunate temporary problem that we'll work out further down the road."
I've seen this attitude at everything from defence contractors ("well yeah, this mechanism is technically designed to maximise the spread of clusterbombs in urban environments, but it's really neat engineering, and we've kept lots of high-paying jobs in the area") to online gambling ("we aren't like all those other firms that are really predatory, our players come to us for lighthearted entertainment and socialisation, not because we're exploiting a highly self-destructive addiction"). These people aren't stupid, and they aren't lying; they've just been slooowly twisted one day at a time until their worldview is out of whack with anyone remotely objective. There's a certain amount of self-selection, as people with a less malleable worldview don't tend to fit in at these companies. They might turn up and do the work, but they never settle in to the culture and soon leave or are pushed out. As a result, they are staffed by people who are easily moulded and sociopaths who are probably well aware of the wider consequences of their actions, but don't care.
This "Boz" guy sounds like the former; he's drunk the Kool-aid and things that what's good for FB is good full stop. Zuck is clearly the latter; he knows that he has done stuff that people would consider morally wrong, but only cares about how the revelation of that behaviour effects him and his company.