How Facebook employees reacted to NYT report on leadership, scandals

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
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• Facebook is battling yet another crisis after a
  bombshell report on how leadership reacted to previous
  scandals.
• Employees at the California tech giant are reacting
  with a mixture of frustration with senior executives and
  distrust of the media.
• One current employee dismissed the report, telling
  colleagues reporters have “an economic incentive to slander
  us.”
• Others were critical of COO Sheryl Sandberg’s
  leadership.

Facebook
employees are reacting with frustration and conflicting emotions
amid withering criticism of its business practices: A
feeling of being under siege by a hostile media has united
many employees at the beleaguered social network, even as dismay
towards the company’s own leadership is growing.

On Wednesday,
The New York Times published a bombshell investigation into
how senior leadership at Facebook tried to downplay and deflect
mounting crises, while smearing critics in ways that have been
accused of fueling anti-Semitism.

It’s the latest in a long line of scandals for Facebook — from
Cambridge Analytica to its spread of hate speech amid genocide in
Myanmar — and employees are now looking for avenues to quietly
vent.

One current employee told Business Insider that some workers view
The New York Times’ reporting as a “hit piece” intended to make
Facebook look bad — and are arguing as much on Workplace,
Facebook’s internal communications platform.

“It seems like they want to take us down a peg, which is natural
because newspapers have been struggling for a *long* time,” one
engineer wrote to their colleagues. “I mean, they have an
economic incentive to slander us.”

The news report examined how Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, COO
Sheryl Sandberg, and other senior executives reacted over the
last year or so to the various crises affecting the company.
Among the revelations was Facebook’s hiring of an opposition
research firm to attack critics as linked to financier George
Soros, a move that risked encouraging anti-Semitic conspiracy
theories. The report also described how Sandberg tried to limit
the scope of public disclosures about Russian election meddling
on Facebook throughout 2017.

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Meanwhile, other Facebook employees took to Blind — an anonymous
work-focused social network — to discuss the report. Many were
harshly critical of company leadership in a private group open
only to Facebook employees, according to messages seen by
Business Insider. (Blind users use pseudonyms to hide their
identities from one another and their employers, but Blind
verifies users’ work email addresses.) 

“Why does our company suck at having a moral compass?” one
asked. 

“I respect [Facebook DC policy boss Joel] Kaplan and Sandberg
even less, we follow a policy of appeasement which leaves no one
happy with us, and Zuck defers too much to others on issues where
he needs to make the call,” was the verdict of another.

“Up until now, I’ve been pretty supportive of our m-team,” a
third said. “But this looks really bad and makes me question our
leadership, Sheryl in particular. The remarks about her being
concerned about her public image is very concerning. I can see
why [former Facebook security chief Alex] Stamos left.”

Another added: “I’ve never understood Sheryl’s appeal. She’s
great at her own brand, but what does she do here?”

On a damage-control conference call with reporters on Thursday,
Zuckerberg defended Facebook’s actions, expressed continued
confidence in Sandberg,
and insisted he was still the best person to run
Facebook. 

“I think we’re doing the right things to fix the issues. I think,
unfortunately, when you’re building something of this scale,
oftentimes, putting in place the solutions can take a long time,”
Zuckerberg said. “And I don’t think that me or anyone else could
come in and snap our fingers and have these issues resolved in a
quarter or half a year. This is not the first time that we’ve had
to deal with big issues for the company.”