In a statement on Sunday, Andy Stone, a Facebook spokesman, said, “Since so much of what has been reported about Facebook is wrong, we think it’s important to provide our employees the facts.”
Ms. Haugen declined to comment on Mr. Zuckerberg’s remarks or the internal discussions, but said in a statement that she came forward partly because of what she called understaffing of teams that worked on misinformation and protecting elections.
She said her former Facebook colleagues “deserve staffing that reflects the enormous magnitude of the work they are doing.”
Over the years, Facebook’s employees have become increasingly outspoken. In June 2020, for instance, hundreds of workers staged a walkout to protest their bosses’ lack of action on inflammatory posts that President Donald J. Trump had published on the site.
Those disagreements, along with questions that Facebook has faced over spreading misinformation and hate speech, have chipped away at the company’s image, which can make it more difficult to recruit new workers.
So when Ms. Haugen revealed herself and said Facebook had chosen “profits before safety,” executives swung into action. Over the past week, several corporate vice presidents have held live internal events to provide employees with more information on how different parts of the company operate, according to a memo obtained by The Times.
The sessions included ones with Guy Rosen, vice president for integrity; Ronan Bradley, vice president for analytics and research; Monika Bickert, vice president for content policy; and Pratiti Raychoudhury, vice president and head of research, the memo said. Each talked about topics such as what the company understands about polarization, changes to the News Feed algorithm and how executives were keeping the platform safe.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/10/technology/facebook-whistleblower-employees.html
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