Facebook Employees in an Uproar Over Executive’s Leaked Memo

In some of his tweets, Mr. Mosseri also defended Facebook. When writers from Vox and BuzzFeed tweeted that they noticed that stories critical of Facebook were receiving surprisingly low levels of traffic on Facebook, Mr. Mosseri jumped in.

“We 100% do not take any action on stories for being critical of us,” he tweeted.

Mr. Bosworth, the author of the 2016 memo, also took to Twitter. Late Thursday, he said he did not agree with what he wrote in the memo “and I didn’t agree with it even when I wrote it.” He added that “the purpose of this post, like many others I have written internally, was to bring to the surface issues I felt deserved more discussion with the broader company.”

After BuzzFeed published the memo, Mr. Bosworth deleted it from an internal message board where it had originally been posted. In a statement to BuzzFeed, Mr. Zuckerberg praised Mr. Bosworth as “a talented leader who says many provocative things” and said that he and most people at Facebook did not agree with the memo and that the company had realized that it could not just be about connecting people.

Facebook employees said on Friday that discussions were raging across the company regarding the merits of the post. Some called for executives to aggressively pursue action against those leaking to the media, said two Facebook employees, as well as for the company to do more to screen for potential whistle-blowers during the hiring process.

At least one former Facebook employee, Alec Muffett, wrote on Twitter that Mr. Bosworth’s memo was responsible for his decision to leave the company.

“Between overwork and leadership direction evidenced thusly, I could never stay,” wrote Mr. Muffett, who formerly worked as a Facebook engineer.

“There are some amazing engineers working at Facebook, folks who care deeply about user privacy, security, and how people will use the code that they write,” Mr. Muffett said later in a message. “Alas this episode may not help” to achieve more transparent internal product discussion, he said.

Continue reading the main story

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/30/technology/facebook-leaked-memo.html?partner=rss&emc=rss